Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Afterwards Bree was asked to wait. She was hustled through the emergency room, and into a public waiting area. The walls were sea green and grainy in the strip light. Alex was already there, and Bree went and sat beside him on a metal seat with fixed armrests. The seats were bolted to the walls. It had the feel of a budget airport departure lounge, except that the room’s hard acoustics rang with the wails of the suffering and the mad.

Doctors appeared through double doors, looked anxious, and vanished again. A drunk with some sort of wound in his leg lay across two seats on the facing wall. His dark grey jogging bottoms were streaked down one leg with a wet black stain, and there were smears of blood and dirt on his hands and face. He was muttering something that sounded like ‘ong, ong, ong’ and every few minutes he would shriek out ‘They’re here! They’re here! They’re here!’ and bang his open hand on the metal chair, some ring or bangle he wore making a piercing clangour as he struck.

An old man with matted hair and several days of stubble sat, in the far corner, topless and dirty, with a twist of webbing slung around his bare chest. His head jerked, sporadically, towards his shoulder but his gaze was fixed on Bree. She broke eye contact and looked at Alex.

Alex sat, still wrapped in the foil blanket they had given him in the ambulance, hunched and looking away. His face was a waxen yellow, his deep-set eyes dark with sleeplessness and shock. He focused on nothing.

‘The thing, then,’ said Bree, quietly. ‘Tell me about it. Where did you hide it?’

Alex took a long time before answering.

‘Who are you?’ he said, still not looking at her.

‘A friend?’

‘Really.’ His voice was dead flat. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. You tell me?’

‘No,’ said Bree. ‘Not really.’ Alex paused, and zoned out again. Bree’s question went ignored. Then, as if remembering something from a dream, he said: ‘You were at the supermarket, weren’t you?’

‘The supermarket?’ Bree tried to think. She picked at a hangnail. Adrenalin, washing back out of her system, had numbed her. Everything felt unreal.

‘The supermarket. Where the man chased me. The dead man.’

‘Yes,’ said Bree. She didn’t know what to say after that. The dead man. The other dead man. The other other dead man.

‘Why did he chase me?’

‘He thinks you have the machine.’

‘I told him,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about.’

‘No?’ Bree looked at him appraisingly. If he was lying he was a good liar. She continued. ‘Something has gone missing. Something that we think – the agency I work for, that is – and the man who had the gun on you thought – the people he worked for, anyway… you have. We’ve been trying to find you. You and your connection in the city.’

‘I’ve got nothing,’ Alex insisted. ‘I came here to see my girlfriend.’

Bree thought about it for a moment. The calls they’d picked up once they’d got hold of his phone records: the calls to a cell on a San Francisco network; then the phone showing up in Las Vegas. The contact: how could it be otherwise?

‘Your girlfriend?’ Bree wondered whether she was going to regret the initiative she had taken while Alex had been unconscious in the ambulance. If Jones had died – if Jones had died for this, she had wanted to make sure it had been for something. She wasn’t going to let it away.

‘Ex-girlfriend, probably. We had – something went wrong that can’t be put right.’

Bree exhaled. She knew all about things that went wrong that couldn’t be put right. She felt a hundred years old.

‘This is bigger than that,’ she said.

‘Oh yes?’ said Alex. Not sounding convinced.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Bree. ‘People are trying to kill you. That man was trying to kill you. It has to have been the machine that saved you. The coincidence engine.’

‘What?’

‘It affects probability. It might be a weapon. Everybody thinks you have it.’

‘I haven’t got anything. I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Well, if you haven’t got it, who has?’

‘If I’ve never heard of it it’s not very likely I’m going to know that, is it?’

Bree fell silent again. She looked down at her hands. Her right palm was slightly tacky with Jones’s blood.

‘You need to stay here with us,’ she said. ‘My boss needs to speak to you.’

‘Oh no. No, no,’ Alex croaked. ‘I’ve got rights. I’m not saying anything. I don’t know who you are.’

‘I work for the government.’

‘A government that puts people in black planes and tortures them? I don’t think so.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Bree. ‘But the other guys will come back. You know that, don’t you? You were lucky this time. Lucky. If you can’t decide who to trust, you’re going to end up dead, my friend. People are already dying because of this thing. My colleague there.’

‘A snooker table fell out of the sky,’ said Alex. ‘How is that something to do with me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bree. ‘I’ve barely heard of snooker. But it fell on a man who was trying to kill you. And it killed a man who was trying to protect you. He’s right in there somewhere -’ she pointed down through the double doors into the lit corridor beyond -’being zipped into a bag. That was my colleague. We were coming to try to help you.’

‘Were you?’

‘We didn’t want you dead. The other guy did. We were on your side. I am on your side.’

‘Nobody’s on my side,’ said Alex. ‘Not even my girlfriend.’

Girlfriend? Jeezus. Talk about self-absorbed. She let the pause ride, and picked a bit at her thumbnail.

‘Want to tell me what happened?’ she said afterwards. Bree didn’t care about the kid’s romantic problems – she had just seen two men die violently at very close quarters, and she wasn’t wanting to think very much about the likelihood that whatever killed them would kill her too. People who got close to this thing were dying.

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

Once again, Bree’s mind did what it always did when traumatised: it sought refuge in the practical. Bree was thinking. She knew the police would have been called – the immediate assumption being that what had happened to Jones was a gunshot wound – and they were likely to have enough trouble with them as it was, explaining what these four people, some with guns, had been doing there in the first place.

The guard at the entrance to the emergency room was already casting the sort of glances their way that suggested he’d been briefed to prevent them walking out if they wanted to. Or was that paranoia? Red Queen would be able to calm this down. Perhaps.

‘It’s my girlfriend, see, Carey. She works here. She was a student where I go to university, in Cambridge. I’m studying for a PhD. You know about Cambridge?’

Bree let him ramble. She thought about the way Jones’s eye had looked when he was lying there in that vacant lot. Not the damaged eye – the other one. Stone grey in the iris. And that sudden sharp opening of the pupil as he came to grief.

‘Anyway, she went home. She’s American, from the West Coast. I came out to visit her and I had this idea that I… It sounds so stupid now, I know. But I thought she was it. She was… it’s hard for me to talk about this to a stranger, but…’

Came to grief . Why was it people said that?

‘I asked her to marry me. She didn’t want to, I don’t think. She sort of hesitated. No. Got to admit it. She turned me down flat. Just like that. I had a ring and everything. I came all the way here to see her.’

As if grief was there already, waiting for you. You don’t go away to it. You arrive. The boy burbled on.