Mappa Mundi (15 page)

She watched him pin another one to the centre line and wondered if she should stand well back or try to catch it on the rise. She would stand forward, of course. It was the only way to go. Deer Ridge was a gateway straight into the Mappa project. She had to shut it.

They tossed a quarter and Mary won. She wanted to see if Miles would choke when he was put on the spot. She elected to receive, and the match began.

If she didn't close off access then the US couldn't win the race to be first to map the mind and discover how to control it. There was no way she could let that happen. Some other country calling the plays and the entire nation forgetful of two hundred and fifty years of history. She was hoping that she would be able to give Miles enough inside hints that he would help her calm down and discredit whoever tried to keep the story alive, particularly in the senator's ear. She could persuade him that the national interest lay her way, and leak only what she had to. But it was going to be tight.

Miles's first serve went wide and he spent some time bouncing the next, lining up his racket, balancing his feet. The second swung in towards her, but she was ready for it. Taking a neat step to the side Mary belted it with a backhand drive that topspun it over the net along the line, way out of his reach. Without meaning to, she felt herself grinning like a lunatic.

He could win it, as long as he didn't make her give it away, that was only polite. But before that happened, she was going to have some fun with him.

The house where Natalie and her father used to live was cold and unwelcoming. She was already regretting her decision to bring Jude
there by the time the door was locked behind them. With her father gone to America these last seven months and nobody but the housekeeper to look after it the place had accumulated a smell of neglect that she associated immediately with the impersonal stench of the Mental Health ward. Both smells existed because of critical absence: one expressed the absolute lack of a physical presence, the other tried to disguise the physical traces of emptied-out minds, covering them up with chemical stinks of bleach and flowers as though smell alone could fool you into thinking they didn't exist.

In the house's deep silence Natalie thought she detected resentment, too. The place blamed her and Calum for the sorry state it was in, a shell without life. It missed Charlotte, her mother, after all these years. Bright and laughing, smelling of warm cookie dough and the faint fiery taint of the Aga's hot metal; long gone. The recollection made her falter but Jude didn't notice.

They sat by candlelight in the kitchen, once Jude had checked the place for bugging devices. He put the case on the table and she saw that he was shivering as he put his hands on the catches, their locks reading his fingerprints with soft licks of green light.

He glanced up at her, his face softer and younger-looking in the yellow glow as the candle flames ate the oxygen between them. If Natalie had had any doubt about his claims to authenticity she lost it then. She knew the look. It was the one she saw before a patient revealed something long hidden. Liars never did it right. They were always watching her too intently, caring too much. Jude was resigned to his own fear.

He looked down at his hands and opened the case, flinching as he saw inside it. He turned it towards her.

Natalie saw a brown manila folder, worn at the edges, sitting in the case like any commuter's package of homework. She wanted to laugh, because what had she expected? She heard him sigh as he thought the same thing.

“There could be a technology you don't know about,” she began, doing her duty to explain away its perfectly ordinary appearance with speculation on the bizarre.

“Yeah,” he said and let her know she needn't continue. “I heard about that.” He grinned at her, doubtfully, and for a second she thought he was going to confess to faking it but instead he said, “I still don't know how to…” He looked down at the file and struggled for the right words. “This is
not
real.”

He moved to touch it, but drew his hand back before he did.

“Let's open it.” Natalie had the courage of beer inside her. She ignored the cold, penetrating damp of her clothes and spun the case to face herself. The folder was heavy. It took her both hands to get it out, but it felt ordinary; paper with smoothed patches from handling. Somebody had done a lot of work on it. She glanced at what else was in the case and saw some things she didn't recognize. Technology … but he quickly pulled it back and out of sight.

“You read it,” Jude suggested. He watched her closely and she saw his nostrils flare with unconscious revulsion. Not at her, she felt—it looked much too unguarded for that.

With a firm hand Natalie flipped the cover open and saw inside it a stamp, similar to the one Glover had had on his files about her—Top Secret.
Welcome to espionage heaven. You have won the jackpot, crackpot.

But her relief at finding evidence of a hoax was cut short as she saw the contents. The papers were official forms, with colour photographs lasered on, and fingerprints, too, lined up in neat rows of boxes. All carried holographic insignia of the Central Intelligence Agency, which made eagles dance above the page corners in the candlelight. The first one meant nothing to her. She read out the salient points, trying not to let her voice disintegrate into the penetrating cold of the kitchen.

“It's a boy. Turkish descent, but Yugoslavian. Hilel … I can't read the surname, maybe it's Muhammad. Islamic. Date of birth, nineteen fifty-five, Sarajevo. Left Yugoslavia in sixty-four. Mother
took him back to Turkey, they settled with her family at Igneada on the Black Sea. Bright kid. Good exam results. One offence for drug possession, then—nothing. No records at all.” Natalie looked at the headings. “It has the original police report attached, in Turkish, I think. What is this?”

Jude shook his head. He looked lost, bewildered. Natalie had to curb her natural irritation at his hesitating face and instead turned back to the files. She flicked through papers typewritten in Turkish, in Arabic, in something that looked Russian but wasn't. Then there was another picture, another front page tacked onto a wad of variegated papers.

“Pavlo Mykytiuk. Ukrainian. These ID papers of his are forgeries, apparently. He lived at Volgograd in the seventies, on a farming cooperative. Yeah, big guy. That diet of beets and vodka really makes them like bulls. What a neck!” She paused, looking at the photograph, and read on. “Looks like he wasn't popular there after a while. Stealing or something like that. He got blamed, anyway. Then he left and went to … Tula, where he was a railway engineer for a year. Member of the Communist Party…” Natalie looked up and joined Jude in staring at the photograph again.

Pavlo was young, pale, with idealism still strongly present in the set of his shoulders and chin, outthrust forcefully; he looked capable of taking care of himself, all right. He had stared into the police camera with complete contempt.

Jude's intensity in examining it almost made her eyes water in sympathy.

“Do you recognize him?” she asked.

“No,” Jude said. He dared to reach across into the file's heart and lift half the stack away. An old, grubby card slid out and Natalie lifted it closer to a candle to read its faded handwriting.

“Russian, I can't read it,” she growled, annoyed.

He took it gently out of her fingertips. “I can.”

At last
, Natalie thought,
the brain gets into gear.
She liked him
again. She watched him read, the unconscious confidence of his ability. She wanted to touch him.

“This is a registration, an entry that's ready to be processed in the Kodeks,” he said, wondering, turning the small, waxy thing over and over as he scanned both sides.

“Codex?” The word meant dusty documents and secret-society nonsense to her.

“A central database of criminal records kept by the Soviets, and then carried on by the Russians after the breakup of the Union. Alexei Kurchatov. Nineteen eighty-five. He must have gone down for years: theft, drug dealing, running a prostitution racket … the usual kinds of charges that the authorities used to throw at people they didn't like to get them off the streets,” Jude turned the card over. “I wonder how they got this out of Moscow.” Then he snorted with amusement. “I wonder whose this is, I guess I should say. Kurchatov. Like that's his real name.”

“Why not?” Natalie asked.

“Kurchatov was a famous Russian scientist from the last century. I guess this guy could be another; there could be millions of Kurchatovs, but what do you think when it says here—no birth papers, no licence, no records of him at all … it's a fake.” He leaned over the table and moved another wad aside, then suddenly grabbed one of the ID sheets as it fanned out from its friends, dragging it under his nose. “Shit!”

“Sorry?” Natalie leaned closer, trying to see.

“Yuri Ivanov,” he said, in a tone of awe. “What's he doing in here?” Jude glanced up at her and shook his head. Inside his dark brown eyes she saw him at his most focused, his mind clear to her in that second, like an open book, like a child, but before she could see more he was back to his picture.

Natalie squinted at the photo. She saw a heavy, Mongol face, brow-shaded eyes glittering with ferocious energy. The man had a thick moustache and long, heavy hair of an intense blue-black. “Who is he?”

But Jude was searching through the other papers, finding a passport,
identification papers from Germany, work permits, academic references. He seemed not to have heard her. Now his hands moving on the pages were still and precise and in the raw flame-light his face had become as serene as a church saint's. Natalie watched the blink of his long, dark lashes across his cheeks, the deep shadow his nose made, straight, clear; the precise outline of his handsome mouth part-opened over his white, straight American teeth.

“Ivanov is the one person I never managed to arrest,” Jude said, suddenly glancing up at her, catching her at it, but not realizing he had, because his concentration was too intensely focused. “A bunch of circumstantial evidence and coincidence. He's an American academic: psychologist, biologist, polymath—a defector. Came over via Germany in the late eighties … complicated man. I met him once.” But the memory must have been unpleasant because Jude made a face as though he'd tasted poison.

Again hesitancy and doubt did their unpicking of his confidence and he seemed to shrink in scale within himself. She knew that feeling and wondered what it was that he'd shared with his quarry—something significant.

Natalie looked down at the sliding heaps on the table. “But who's everyone else here?”

“I don't know,” Jude snapped back and shook his head. He squinted at the sea of data.

“No coincidence now, though,” she said and he looked up at her. “I mean, you getting this. It explains why, sort of. Here's a man you want. And here're some of his papers. Maybe this is what you needed all along to get some kind of conviction?”

“And God gave it to me?” he said sarcastically.

She shrugged and grinned. “Maybe.”

Jude went back to sifting. Medical records. Immigration papers. Registration forms. Social Security. Natalie was glad this wasn't her job to sort out.

“Oh wait!” She flicked the papers her way round and almost spilled wax on them. Her whole body went cold.

Without a doubt, beneath the glowing eagle's wings it was a photograph of Mikhail Guskov.

“What?” Jude was staring at her now.

Natalie knew that this was something she shouldn't talk about, except now she was stuck with it and it was hardly as though the evening wasn't already a total violation of her signature on the Official Secrets Act. The Home Office were going to write her a permanent ticket to prison.

“This is Mikhail Guskov,” she said. “He … works on the same project as I do. In America. Have you investigated him?”

“No,” Jude kept on staring at her. “You know him? Well?”

“No,” she said, getting her composure back with a bit of help from Jennifer the Hotline girl's diversion technique. “Not at all. Just his name and face. There aren't that many of us, really.” Now the files disturbed her suddenly, and they hadn't before. She shoved the incriminating page aside—it was the last in the folder—and then as she glanced down it was as if her heart really did jump into her throat. Bawhamp. It stopped. Blood dropped into her feet. Her head swam.

It was there. After all these years. Right there in front of her. Bang. Just like that. Proof of the inexplicable.

“What?” Jude was demanding. “What? Dammit!”

Natalie couldn't believe it. She pointed at the folder's inner face and even Jennifer had no reaction to use as a cover.

“That,” she whispered.

Jude read the scrawled words, crammed in between an elaborate drawing composed of pencil lines that circled and turned on each other, creating forms that seemed to try and leap off the page. “Due back: 15 June 2015.” He shook his head. “That's today.”

Dazed, a shock space inside of her bigger than the room she was standing in, Natalie traced the heavily scored lines of the doodle with
her finger, her other hand holding onto her face, to check it was still there as much as to support it.

“You don't understand,” she said. Her finger felt the gouges, followed as though it already knew the way and, after all, it did, because this was a picture of The Map.

“This is my handwriting.”

Jude had, until that moment, not believed his own story about the file. It had become just that. A story. Even holding it and reading its extraordinary contents couldn't make him accept the way he'd come upon it. But Natalie's reaction changed him.

She began to shake—not the shiver he'd had, but convulsively, in whole-body jerks. Her grey-green eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open, her face expressionless, abandoned. It was as though she had left her body and was somewhere outside it, in recoil from the whole of the physical world. Only her finger remained under a conscious control in its sensory touching and retracing of the peculiar lines; a chant of form that was drawing her under its spell.