Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

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.