She opened the evidence bag and removed the gleaming bright bracelet, studying it closely. When she was done she examined the two other items that had been alongside it: a slip of paper and a recent Indian passport in the name of Kavi Balan. The photo inside showed an inoffensive-looking Indian man perhaps 30 with a bland, perhaps naive face. He had, she thought, very prominent and unusual eyes and wondered whether they had noticed. Probably not. Harold Middleton and Leonora Tesla were both intelligent, hard-working officers, trapped, Felicia had observed, inside an organization they seemed unable to leave. But small details often escaped them. They possessed neither the time nor the inclination to look much beyond the obvious.
"Our business, not yours," Middleton announced.
"He's dead, I imagine," she said, and they didn't reply. "Didn't you notice his eyes . . . ?"
She was stalling and they knew it. As she spoke, she scanned the sheet of paper. The writing was in Harold Middleton's hand, easily recognizable for its cultured yet hurried scrawl.
It read: Kashmir. Search for water. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.
"It sounds like a puzzle," she said. "I love riddles. I never knew you did . . . "
"I hate them."
"What does Scorpion refer to?"
"It was a reference in an email from Sikari. I think it's a person, but I don't know if he's allied with Sikari or is a threat to him."
"The bracelet is beautiful."
It looked like copper, though the color was lighter, more golden than most bangles of its type. In Poland, copper wristbands were popular among the elderly who believed they warded off rheumatism and disease. The jewelry she saw hawked around the cheap street markets in Warsaw looked nothing like this. The metal here was softer, paler, as if it were some kind of subtle alloy, the edges, flecked with green, more finely worked, with a line of writing in a flowing, incomprehensible Indian script, and, most curious of all, an oval feature like a badge, a mark of pride for its wearer perhaps.
"What does this mean?" she asked.
"I wish I knew," he replied. "We think it's from Kashmir. An identity bracelet, maybe denoting membership in a gang, a cult, an organization of some kind. Presumably the emblems stand for something. It could be connected with India. Or Pakistan. They've been fighting one another over Kashmir for half a century. I need to get it to the lab, get the inscription translated."
Felicia stared at it and frowned.
"You have any ideas?" he asked.
"What? Some little kid Polish musician? What would I know?" She looked at the copper bracelet again. "You never do crosswords do you?"
"I told you. I hate puzzles."
"That's because you think logically, in one direction only. Crosswords are like Bach. Or jazz. They demand you think in several different directions simultaneously. Call and response, question and answer, all in the same moment."
She examined the bracelet again.
"The point is . . . All the information you need is there. In front of your face. Nothing is missing. You just have to make the links."
Middleton looked interested. It was the mention of Bach that did it.
"My problem," she added, "is I still think in Polish, not English. I love crosswords but they're too hard for me in your language. I used to wish you could see them instead of read them. You know what I mean? Look at cross pictures. Not words. That way language isn't so important."
They had what weapons they wanted. They were ready to go. Middleton held out his hand and she passed to him the note and the photograph of the dead Indian with the curious eyes. He placed them back in the evidence packet and slipped them into his carryall. She clung to the copper bangle, waiting for the question.
"If the pictures on the bracelet were a crossword," Middleton asked, "what do you think they might mean?"
Leonora Tesla shook her head. "We're giving these to a bunch of forensic people, Harry. Not a crossword expert."
"That's a shame," Felicia said.
They looked at her.
"Because? . . ." Middleton asked.
She pointed at the moon on the bracelet
"This would be the answer, I think. The part that is calling. See how it's separate, and the other two elements are subsidiary to it, as if their response somehow answers everything. The elephant. The way he blows his trunk comically into the sky, like a fountain, except that the liquid doesn't go very far, does it? The stream falls to earth so quickly, as if it weighs more than it should. This seems obvious to me."
"Obvious?" he asked.
"Look! It's an elephant. The biggest land animal on the planet. What's he doing? Trying to spray the moon, and failing. Two words. Maybe it's me being crazy but remember: I was born in the year of Chernobyl. We weren't far away. Five hundred kilometers maybe. At school they came along every six months and took our blood to see if the explosion had done something bad to us."
That blunt needle, the same one they used on everyone, hurt which was why she had read so avidly to understand its cause.
She put her finger on the carefully carved beast on the bracelet and said, "Heavy."
Then she indicated the fountain of liquid rising from the beast toward the sky and falling back again, too quickly. "Water."
Felicia Kaminski couldn't help but notice that Harold Middleton went a little paler when she said that.
"Chernobyl happened because there was no heavy water," she said quickly. "The Russians used some cheap and useless method of their own to produce a nuclear reactor which was why the plant exploded. I'm sorry. This is doubtless just me . . . As to the moon, I've no idea."
They didn't say anything for a moment as Middleton looked at her, his benign, bland face creased with concern.
"You're practicing here for the rest of the day?" he asked.
"Practice, practice, practice. After a while . . . "
"Stay indoors. I'll arrange a cab to the Wigmore Hall and a hotel for you this evening. Pack your things. Leave your bag here when you go to the concert. We'll pick it up for you later."
"But . . . "
They didn't wait for anything except a few short pleasantries. Felicia Kaminski watched them go, wishing they could have stayed a little longer. She knew no one in London. She felt a little lonely and bored.
"Practice," she hissed. "If I practice one more time I'll go mad."
As the door closed, she picked up a piece of paper and scribbled down the words she remembered from Harold Middleton's note.
Some forensics people would be running through every last one to try to forge a link. Maybe--she was worried, slightly, by the look on Middleton's face when she threw in her idea about the bracelet--they would be looking to see what the term "heavy water" meant in relation to India, Pakistan and the Kashmir question. Quite a lot, possibly, not that she wanted to think much about that. The dark shadow Chernobyl had cast over Eastern Europe had never quite lifted from her.
She looked at the grandfather clock by the fireplace. Two hours remained before she had to leave, a little less if she packed as Middleton had wanted. She had time. There was something else she could use too, something she felt sure Middleton and Tesla would never have countenanced.
Felicia Kaminski went to her laptop computer and pulled up the web page for Bicchu, the new search engine she'd stumbled upon only a month ago. It was all the rage in the social networks. The answers were sharp and relevant, almost as if someone were reading the question then thinking about its context and perspective before responding. It felt smart and human, not part of some dumb machine. Best of all, Bicchu promised to pay you for being online, for typing in queries and following through on the results. Just a few cents but it was something. For all the glamour of an appearance at the Wigmore Hall, she still felt like a music student when she looked at her bank balance. It would be years before she could even hope to command a reliable income.
Felicia glanced down and typed in the words on her scribbled note.
Kashmir. Search for water
. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.
Then she added a phrase of her own: heavy water.
And another: copper ring around the eyes.
It took longer than normal for the answers to appear. A good 10 seconds. Must have been Middleton's broadband connection, she thought.
He sat in the restaurant near Piccadilly Circus, glued to the iPhone they'd given him, working the private application that linked through the mobile network, securely, privately, to the field HQ. He'd no idea where that was. In Kashmir. In Paris. Two doors away in the heart of London. It was irrelevant. The days of fixed bases, of dangerous safe houses and physical networks capable of penetration . . . all these things were in the past. It was thirteen months since he'd last met another comrade in person. As far as he knew anyway. Orders came via secure encrypted email delivered to a series of ever-changing addresses. Plans and projects arrived as password protected zipped pdfs, read, absorbed, and then deleted forever. This was the way of the world. Everything was virtual. Nothing was real. Except, he reminded himself, blood and money.
A YouTube video had just begun--the trailer for some new Bollywood movie--when the phone throbbed and flashed up an alert. It took a second or two for the signal to deal with the amount of data that followed. Then, as the little handset caught up, he watched as a series of web search requests were mirrored to his little screen. The results narrowed constantly. The scope and scale of the queries made him realize why they'd got in touch. A small window in the upper right hand corner showed the IP address of the source. It was in central London, somewhere near the British Museum. He tapped a few buttons. There was a pause then he found himself in the My Documents folder of the remote computer. A long list of correspondence was stored there. It was all encrypted. He hunted around the remote hard drive until he found the folder where the word processor stored its templates, unseen, often forgotten by those who used them. Sure enough when he got there he found a single file marked "personal letter." It was open, unsecured by encryption, just text.
He clicked the icon and the document drew itself on the screen of the phone. Dragging his finger across the letters he managed to copy the address into a note. Then he clicked a button in the private app marked "key-log all remote." Every letter and number typed on the distant machine would now be echoed directly into a file somewhere in the Bicchu system then passed on discreetly, encrypted from beginning to end, to his phone where the private app would decode the text automatically.
After that he copied the house number and street in the heading and pasted them into Google Maps. He knew the general area. It was no more than ten minutes away on foot. Pocketing the iPhone he walked back into the kitchen. It was full of the familiar smells, cumin and turmeric, a tandoori oven and scorched spiced chicken.
The sous chef watched him come in, as if half expecting what was about to happen. The little man from Bangladesh was staring mutinously at an office lunch booking for sixteen. It had been pinned to the order board just thirty minutes before.
"You can cope," he said, taking off his apron and his stained tocque. Then he walked out of the back, stopping only to collect his little Walther pistol on the way.
Bicchu was feeling talkative. Soon the answers began to come so quickly her head started to spin. She thought of the fearful years after Chernobyl, the pain, the uncertainty. And the school friends she lost, two, who died slowly, almost in front of everyone, day by day.
This was the world of the past, or so she'd thought. A world of hard, cruel science, in the thrall of men who didn't care about the consequences of their actions. Watching the hints and clues and links begin to assemble as minutes turned to an hour, she felt herself both repelled and attracted by what she was uncovering. This was important, she knew. And forbidden, terrible knowledge.
After one significant breakthrough, she tore herself away from the computer, made herself a cup of green tea, felt briefly guilty about neglecting her instrument and chose, instead, to listen to one of her favorite renditions of the piece she would play later. A fellow Pole, Henryk Szeryng, playing his famed Guarneri del Gesu "Le Duc" for Deutsche Grammophon in 1968: fourteen and a half minutes of bliss.
Then she went back and looked at what she'd found. A lot. Too much. It made her mind turn in on itself, craving the peace and simple faith of the music.
She called Middleton's cell phone. There was no answer. There wasn't even the chance to leave a message.
"That's not your real number is it, Harold?" she said to herself, half listening to Szeryng tackle the music with a studied assurance she hoped one day she might possess.
He wondered what would happen in the restaurant with him gone. The Bangladeshi was competent but slow. It was still a business, still a place that needed to look after its customers.
Later, he thought. The top end of Lamb's Conduit Street, after the pubs and shops, was deserted. Everyone had gone to work. This was good. The only vehicle around was a large black van with opaque windows on a meter at the park end of the street. Children leapt and danced in the little playground on the other side of the road. He glanced at the van and shook his head. London mothers. They wouldn't let their precious little princes walk half a mile any more.
She typed what she'd discovered into an email for Middleton and made sure to mark it for encryption, adding the digital signature he'd convinced her to use always on the net. No one could read what she'd written once it traveled beyond her computer and Middleton could be assured the message really came from her, not some imposter who knew how to spoof an email address.
"Fact one," she wrote, and she shivered as she was unable to force the true import of her words from her mind. "The picture of the dead man, Kavi Balan. What you didn't notice was the very peculiar green brown tint to his eyes. That may be normal. But it may be a symptom of copper poisoning, due to very heavy exposure to the metal. Look up Kayser-Fleischer ring for more information. The discoloration is caused by copper deposits in the eye."
She looked at her notes then checked her watch. Six minutes to the end of the Bach. Then she really would practice.
"Fact two. India is the world's largest producer of heavy water. This is a very resource-intensive exercise. Depending on the process it can take up to 340,000 tons of ordinary water, H2O, to make one ton of heavy water, D2O (that's deuterium, Harold--look it up). Maybe this is why your people are looking for new sources."
The tea was getting tepid.
"Remember what I told you about Chernobyl and heavy water? You don't always need it. But if you want to produce weapon-grade plutonium it's a wonderful way of bypassing the uranium enrichment process, which involves a lot of technological infrastructure that's impossible to hide. Not that heavy water is easy to manufacture but the process is a little like distilling cognac from wine. The difference is the conventional process uses a phosphor-bronze system to handle the distillation process whereas liquor is traditionally made using a copper still."
She looked at the words on the page and felt proud of herself. Or, more accurately, of Bicchu, which had thrown up the answers so quickly she could scarcely believe the ease with which they had been assembled.
"Fact three. Eleven years ago, a patent was filed in the U.S. for a new heavy-water development process. As far as I can see it's never been put into industrial production because some of the technology isn't in place to go large scale yet. The patent was lodged by the U.S. subsidiary of an Indian company that appears to be a shell outfit. At least I can't see any financial filings for it in the U.S. or in India." She'd retrieved the entire submission from the U.S. Patents Office database for free and saved it as a separate document.
"Sikari's name is on the patent too, along with a couple of other people. According to the patent submission the process would halve the amount of feed water normally needed to distill heavy water, shorten the process considerably and allow for minimal startup costs. You could almost see it as a DIY kit for making the raw material for a plutonium plant. And . .
. "
Always save the best for last. The dead Henryk Szeryng, bowing away at his Guarneri in the background, did.
"The particular circular piping structure used for the process is at the heart of the patent. It's what makes it unique. The filing calls it 'the copper bracelet.' Except this one happens to be thirty feet tall."
She finished the cold tea and listened to the music enter its final, closing phase.
The doorbell rang as she hit send. Felicia cursed the interruption. One of the less attractive aspects of Lamb's Conduit Street was the number of people who came to private houses trying to sell everything from fake DVDs to Chinese paintings. Middleton had a little sign by the front of the house: no hawkers. It was useless. This being England, he didn't have a door video camera. There was trust in a quiet, upper-class street like this, along with big powerful locks and a high-tech alarm system.
The bell rang once more while she was walking out of the living room into the corridor.
"I don't want any," she shouted, and was surprised to hear an American twang in her voice. Two years in New York did this to you, she guessed.
She unlocked the latch and half opened the door. A stocky man of Middle Eastern appearance was standing there. He was no more than 30, wore a Chelsea football shirt under a jacket, a trendy slicked-back haircut and the kind of stupid self-satisfied grin some young London men liked to sport when they encountered the opposite sex.
"I don't want any," she repeated with a sigh.
He looked pleased with himself and held up what looked like a brand new iPhone. Her email to Harold Middleton was there, with the last few paragraphs including the words "except this one happens to be thirty feet tall" visible in large black lettering. Puzzled, Felicia Kaminski blinked.
"You got it anyway," the man said.
She drew back to slam the door in his face. The wood hit something along the way. She heard a yelp of pain but he was through, and there was no way of getting him outside again. A glancing blow struck her cheek and she stumbled toward the living room and grabbed the wooden inner door, sending it flying behind her.
He got struck hard in the face a second time and yelled again. Anger. Hurt. She liked both of them.