The Ultimate Secret (8 page)

“People like you?” he asked, in the same gentle tone, although she thought the air grew a little more tense. “People with sick mothers? People with” – he glanced at the sheet in front of him – “excellent school results? Really
very
young women?” He laced his hands over his belly. It was hard to read him, behind his moustache and his round-lensed glasses. The room was gloomy, the blinds behind her pulled low to block out the afternoon sun, but stray beams of light struck his glasses when he moved, and his eyes – dark eyes, but bland, as if he had blinds behind them as well – came and went behind flashes of brilliant white. He allowed the question to hang in the air for a few seconds, and then continued. “Or do you mean half-castes?”

Kim’s cheeks burned. She shrugged, then stopped herself and straightened her back again. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded once, to himself, and looked down at her resume again. She followed his eyes. The desk was old; the dark wood battered and nicked, the green leather stained and ripped.

“Why didn’t you try at the offices of the British East India Company?” he asked. “These results really are outstanding; even if you couldn’t afford to go to university, you could have found work as a clerk.” He looked back up at her.

She hesitated. “Because–” She wasn’t sure how to proceed. Did he really not know how the East India Company operated? Was this a test? “Because you can’t. They only hire English people. Even half-castes only have a chance if they have someone to vouch for them. Everybody knows that.”

“Indeed,” he said, shifting in his seat. “Well, if everyone knows it, it must be true. And your mother? She couldn’t help?”

Kim shook her head. “No, sir. My mother... she left Britannia under a cloud. Didn’t get on with her family. The Dashwoods... she’d argued with her uncle.”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” He fell silent and focused on her resume again. The smells of cooking – sauces, spices, grilling meat – wafted through the window from the market outside the building, and Kim’s stomach rumbled. She’d missed breakfast.

“Beautiful woman, your mother,” he said at last. “Everyone loved her.”

“Sir?” Kim stared at him.

“Smith, Kim. I said, call me Smith.”

“It’s not your name, though, is it, si – Mr Smith?”

He looked up from the paper and stared at her, and his eyes were clear this time, piercing. “Do you know what I do here, Kim?”

“Well...” Kim hesitated again. She wasn’t sure what would be politic, but had the feeling that Smith wanted her to be honest, no matter what. “The sign on the door says ‘imports and exports.’”

“That’s right.” Smith nodded once, but continued to hold her in his gaze.

“If I had to guess–”

“I do not want you to guess, Kim,” said Smith. “You may observe and reason; from what I can tell, it is something at which you will excel.”

“Yes, Mr Smith. In that case... I’d say you were a spy. Or a criminal.”

“Indeed?” Smith smiled and leaned back in his seat again. “And how do you feel about being in here with a spy, or criminal?”

Kim thought for a moment, looking at the walls. A cluster of framed certificates hung on the wall behind Smith, with a different name on each one. Kapur, Patel, Siriwardana. “Well... I’d say if you were that worried about people knowing what you do, you’d be a little more careful about how you presented yourself. I’d say you do business based on people realising you’re a spy or a criminal, but not saying anything about it. Like a polite lie. Because sometimes people need to work with a spy or a criminal, but have to be able to deny that they knew it.”

Smith chuckled. “You’re a bright girl, Kim.” He looked down at the resume again for a moment, then said, “I am a little of both. And yes, I do have work, and I often take on people of your heritage. You belong to two worlds, Kim; you’re uniquely suited to certain lines of work. Like crime, for instance. Or espionage.”

He fell silent again, and Kim wasn’t sure if an answer was required. “Mr Smith?” she ventured.

“Hm? Most people just call me Smith, Kim.” He smiled.

“Smith, then. How did you know my mother?”

“Oh,” he said, looking distant for a moment. “I didn’t, really. I knew your father. We took a history class together in university. I met your mother through him, but I wouldn’t say I ever really knew her. She didn’t really approve of me.”

“Why not?” Kim found herself moving towards the faded leather chair near her, stopped herself from sitting.

“We had... dangerous ideas, I suppose. We used to talk of a free India. Our history professor – Dr Ghandi, he was called; Mohandas Ghandi – spoke of a peaceful uprising. He’d been involved in the disturbances back in the ’forties, seen what happens when we try to fight the East India Company and their automaton sepoys. Your father had disagreed, thought the Indian people could be strong, united. I could never decide, argued with both men.

“Your mother thought it was all rot, and dangerous talk to boot. The Company has people everywhere, looking out for sedition, listening to every conversation.”

“So what happened?”

He shrugged. “We stopped. Graduated, went our separate ways. I haven’t spoken to your mother since around the time you were born.”

“But what–”

Smith held up his hand. “And we have gone on in this vein for too long, and my time is valuable. You came to me for work, and work I have.”

“Yes, Smith.” Kim straightened, her head spinning. Her mother rarely spoke of her father, and when she did it was only to speak of how handsome he was, how devoted a husband and father he’d been. Her grandfather, Manvir, could only tell stories of his childhood, in the little village inland where he grew up.

Smith reached for a manila folder on his desk, handed it to her. “Simple enough job. Collect two men from the docks, take them to an address. They have a job to do there. Then you’ll collect a package from the address and bring it back here. Be careful; you’ll very likely be followed. You must lose anyone following you and return.”

Kim flipped through the file. Two pictures of Englishmen; engineers of some sort. A time, a ship name. An address, some basic instructions. She looked up, met his gaze. “And–”

“You’ll be paid a thousand rupees for your trouble. If you perform this task to my satisfaction, there will be more work.”

“But I–”

“Another time, Kim,” said Smith, raising his hand. “Do this for me and we’ll talk about your father another time.”

Wordlessly, Kim nodded and walked out. The Englishmen’s ship was due in an hour, and she needed to eat.

“R
UDDY
I
NDIA,
”
SAID
Ledgerwood, already sweating in his tweed suit as he emerged from the fan-cooled deck into the afternoon sun, heaving his trunk behind him. “Why can’t we be somewhere civilised, eh?”

“I don’t understand why you’re even dressed that way,” said Hotston, coming up behind him with a small valise. His sleeves were held up with St Georges and his shirt open at the neck; his own jacket had been stowed away a week into the journey and not emerged since.

“We’re meeting a new client, aren’t we?” Ledgerwood rumbled. “Best foot forward and all that.”

“That’s not really how things are done here. People are sensible about the weather.”

“How do you know that, then? And why am I dragging the ruddy trunk?” Ledgerwood dropped the offending luggage with a dramatic flourish and a startling
bang
. Several of the other passengers looked at him curiously.

“You offered to, as I recall. I’m sure we can get a porter when we get to the dock. And I know it because my mother’s Indian, you pillock.”

“I thought she lived in Berkshire.”

“She does. She wasn’t born there.”

“Hmph. Anyway, I didn’t mean the heat. Why’re we in India, of all places? The telegraphy’s rotten in the cities and nonexistent anywhere else. What are we supposed to achieve here? We’re analyticists. Even if we were in Calcutta, I’d understand it – we could work at the university – but bloody Mumbai?”

Hotston took hold of the handle on the trunk, heaved it up and scanned the docks, looking for any sign they were expected. Between disembarking passengers, people meeting them, sailors, dock-workers and beggars, it was too much a melee to tell. He shrugged and headed for the gangway.

“Mumbai’s come a long way, Matthew. Everything’s on the up and up; they’re calling it the ‘city of cranes,’ now.” And the city that crowded the deep harbour was that, at least. Hotston counted a dozen new building sites at least before giving up, all for modern Britannian high-rises. Tent cities had sprung up around and between the sites; temporary slums to house the construction workers. “Anyway, it’s not an analytics job; it’s cryptography. We’re decoding some sort of message. That’s why we’ve got Rosie, here.” He hefted the trunk.

“Hmph.” Ledgerwood had removed his jacket now and draped it over his left arm. He had succeeded in digging out his ticket and was fanning himself. “And that’s supposed to be reassuring, is it? Has it occurred to you, Stewart old boy, that this signal we are decoding will be arriving by telegraph? The very same telegraph, as I was just saying, that drops out completely half the time, and suffers a ten-to-twenty-per cent loss the rest? We’ll be four bloody days just getting a coherent signal before we can even warm your new toy up.”

‘Rosie’ was a gift from their new, mysterious employer, a Rosworth Mk IV Cryptological Decoder, a single-function portable analytical engine hardwired to decode encrypted signals. She was a limited thinker, compared with some of the devices they were used to working with, but good at what she was made for, and designed to reprogram herself, adding each code she cracked to her database, which she cross-referenced to find common elements whenever she encountered a new one. Ledgerwood hadn’t performed decryption since their undergraduate days, but he hadn’t forgotten the principles.

“To be honest, old chap,” said Hotston, as he made his way along the gangway, trunk trundling along behind him, “it’s not like we have much choice. The Sultan’s made it clear we weren’t welcome back in Istanbul. We can’t very well head back home as long as the Committee for Ethics in Analytics has it in for us. And that business in Milan’s probably put the kibosh on working in the Socialist League, for the time being.”

“I don’t know what their beef is,” Ledgerwood protested. “They wanted the machine to think faster; we more than doubled its processing speed.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately it didn’t
know
it was thinking faster, did it? I don’t know exactly how much it costs to replace that much factory equipment, but I imagine it’s a fair sight more than our commission.” He sighed. The queue off the boat slowed as they approached the dock. “At any rate, at least we’re on Britannian soil, after a fashion. Could be worse; we could be working in America. You’d be begging for Indian telegraphy then.”

Ledgerwood huffed. “Fat chance.” He fanned himself for a moment, reflecting. “I’ve always wondered. What is it with the Yanks? Why don’t they use electricity?”

Hotston shrugged. “Politics. They’d invested so much in steam, before Independence. When Britannia discovered electricity, I guess they saw it as a symbol of Imperialism.”

The larger man mused on this for a moment. “I suppose it is, really. You always know you’re in the arms of old Vicky, when you’re ten thousand miles from home and there’s still a power point in the corner.”

“And then there’s that Doc Thunder chap. Apparently he keeps pressure on the government to keep out of it. Thinks it’s too dangerous to be in the hands of mortal men.”

Ledgerwood chuckled. “Pish. Like steam’s any safer.”

They stepped off the gangway and onto the Mumbai dock, and were immediately set upon by beggars and porters, grabbing at their clothes and trunk and calling for attention. “No!” shouted Hotston, flapping his hands. “Get off!” He clutched the trunk, looking around desperately. He turned to Ledgerwood. “A little help would be good?”

“Don’t you talk the language, then? I thought your mother was Indian.”

“Well, she wasn’t Marathi, was she? Stop being an arse and see if you can see who this Smith person sent. Or even a robo-bobby, or something.”

“Alright, alright.” Ledgerwood straightened and cast about through the crowds.

“Dr Ledgerwood? Dr Hotston?”

The voice came from behind them. Ledgerwood wheeled, a little too quickly, and staggered. “Yes?”

A pretty Indian girl of about sixteen or seventeen stood behind him, dark hair tied up in a ponytail, hands behind her back, smiling pleasantly.

“You are Doctors Ledgerwood and Hotston?”

“Clearly,” said Hotston, pulling the trunk over to her and straightening. One of the five or six porters who had persisted up to this point started shouting at the others at the sight of the mysterious girl, and they quietened down.

She grinned and held her hand out. “I’m Kim. I’ve been sent to collect you.” As Hotston shook her hand uncertainly, she continued, “You’ll need a porter for your trunk, of course.”

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll be–”

“I’m afraid you’ve no real choice. You’ll be badgered until you hire one.” As if to prove her point, the porters resumed their clamouring, pushing each other out of the way and waving in the men’s faces.

“Hire that one,” she said, pointing at the shortest of them; Hotston thought he’d been the one shouting the others down. “I know him; he’s honest. His name’s Suni. And he won’t charge you more than twenty rupees or so.”

“Why, that’s not much more than a shilling,” said Ledgerwood, fishing in his pocket.

“Then it won’t be a great imposition on you.” She rattled off instructions to Suni, sending the others on their way, and the boy stepped forward, bowed solemnly and heaved the trunk bodily onto his back.

“Doesn’t he speak English, then?” asked Hotston, as the four of them headed off the docks and onto the road.

“Perfectly, Dr Hotston,” replied Kim, with a slight smirk. Suni looked up with a huge grin. “The porters always start speaking to tourists in Marathi.”

Hotston chuckled. “So where are we headed, then?”

“Sion. It’s north of here. Do you have the machine?”