Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

‘No?’

‘They’ve got game theorists on it. Your department, usually. But, no. Bottom line – nobody wants to jump first. They’d rather just watch the dominoes go down; hope the bomb drops everywhere.’

Porlock moved his hand to his tie, straightened it.

‘Not good news for you, Porlock,’ said Red Queen. ‘Is it?’

‘Not good news for anyone,’ Porlock repeated.

‘Especially bad for you.’ Here, Red Queen sent out a questing thumb to scratch diffidently, almost coquettishly, at the scratched leather of the desktop. Looked down, then up again. ‘Not sure you’ll get paid, after all this, though I imagine you’ve thought of that yourself.’

Porlock frowned. The lightbox on the wall of the room gave his face an unhealthy lustre, reflected as twin white rectangles on the balls of his eyes. He looked wary. Red Queen continued.

‘Your friend Ellis is going to be out of a job, isn’t he?’ Porlock’s composure started to break. ‘And I don’t think there’s much chance of anyone getting a finder’s fee now, is there? Money’s a little tight over there…’

‘I still don’t follow you,’ said Porlock, although he did.

‘…and if I’m frank about it, I’m not sure how much use we’re going to have for you now there’s no MIC for you to pass information to. You’ve served your purpose, as far as the Directorate is concerned.’

‘You’re accusing – me – of passing information to MIC?’

‘Only the information I wanted passed,’ said Red Queen. ‘But, yes. Very much so.’ Red Queen picked up the telephone and spoke without dialling: ‘Porlock’s out. Call in Our Friends to pick him up for that talk. Yes. Thank you.’ Replaced the receiver.

Porlock bridled. Red Queen looked at him directly, without emotion.

‘You’ll find your canteen card has been revoked.’

Bree jerked awake. She heard her own mouth slap shut, and felt the pig-belch of an interrupted snore detonate in her throat. The green-white sub-aqua light of the waiting area hurt her eyes. She closed them again.

For an instant, she was in and out of sleep. Her thoughts had been sinking down through layers. She was in and out of a sheaf of fragments. Jones’s eye, filling with blood, black in the moonlight. Watery recursions: standing at a table, drinking fast and anxiously, someone always about to come in. And then, again, the death-dream: the walls peeling away and the gathering roar of voices.

‘…Nobody knows where he is…?’ was a phrase that cut over, in a voice she seemed to know, from nearby. She opened her eyes, and her neck ached, and the ceiling was still there, attached to each wall by a right angle.

‘My boyfriend. He’s hurt. Someone called me from this hospital. Where the hell is he?’

The voice came, high on the air through the noise of the room – a girl still not long out of her teens, high and hysterical and slightly slurred, somewhere on the other side of the room. Bree didn’t know why, but as soon as her dream slipped away, something cold entered her diaphragm and stayed there. Her head moved to find the source of the sound. She felt the room retreating from her.

At the entrance to the corridor deeper into the hospital there was a girl arguing with a woman in a medical orderly’s outfit. The girl was turned half away from Bree, and the sleep in Bree’s eyes.

‘…you’d just calm down…’ the orderly was saying.

‘…English, his name is Alex. ALEX SMART. He’s got a…’

‘…I told you…’

‘…Jesus, I can’t believe this place, don’t you keep any sort of records…?’

‘…I’ll ask the duty nurse…’

Bree pulled herself out of her chair, started to move towards the scene. Her legs were stiff from the chair. She came up on the girl. Pink vinyl bag hanging from a shoulder strap; faded T-shirt; a rash of goosebumps over the skin of her upper arm. What had he said the girl was called?

‘Carey,’ said Bree.

The girl turned round, wild. Her face was naked and her eyes puffy from drink and crying and sleeplessness, and there was a mole at the hinge of her jaw. Bree wasn’t aware of inhaling.

‘Cass?’ Bree said, with the walls of the world lifting up and light crashing in.

The girl who had once been called Cass and was now called Carey and had lost her mother years ago in that instant forgot her nearly fiancé and her foster-parents and her exhaustion. She stood there in a T-shirt that said ‘Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables’, and opened her mouth in astonishment and said: ‘Mom?’

‘Help you, ma’am?’ said the orderly.

It wasn’t as Bree had imagined it. It wasn’t as Carey had imagined it either. Both of them had run the scenario over and over again. Often, at the same time and in different places – one on one coast, often, one on the other – mother and daughter had fantasised their meeting in any number of ways, their different scenarios echoing in invisible antiphony through the churn.

Carey had imagined herself coldly eloquent – had imagined herself quietly but politely informing her mother that she had shed her name, that she didn’t want to see her, that she owed her nothing. Bree had imagined being forgiven.

Carey had imagined meeting her mother. Carey had imagined telling her mother that she had changed her name because she didn’t want to hear the name her mother used in the mouth of her foster-parents. Bree had imagined being slapped.

Time didn’t stop. The waiting room was the same green. There was no dam-burst of wordless recognition, no automatic hugs, no tears. They just stood, two strangers all the stranger for having known each other, with precisely a metre of impassable space between them.

‘Cass -’ Bree said again.

Carey looked as if punched. Her mouth worked.

‘Cass -’

‘I. Mom. I.’ Everything was rushing in on Carey. She was confused. She said: ‘You’ve put on some weight.’

Bree nodded, and she felt her eyes filling. Carey shook her head. It was too much to comprehend, too much to deal with. ‘I need to find my boyfriend,’ she said, rubbing the back of one hand with her chewed nails. ‘He’s had an accident -’

‘Alex,’ said Bree. ‘He was here. He’s fine.’

‘I – Mom. I can’t cope with this now. I need to – my boyfriend’s had an accident. I need to find him, OK? He’s upset.’

‘He’s fine,’ said Bree. ‘Can we talk?’

Neither of them moved. Bree, after a bit, raised her eyes and folded her arms and said: ‘I know where he’s staying. I’ll take you there.’

It was in a very quiet voice, and while she was looking at her feet, that Carey said, as they walked out of the waiting area under a dark blue sky lightening with dawn: ‘I missed you.’

They walked out together through the door and the guard by the emergency room didn’t challenge them and the police never came.

Carey found the hotel and went up to the eighth-floor room where Bree had said Alex’s room would be. There was a double-wide maid in a uniform made from synthetic fibres hip-nudging a cart further up the corridor.

‘Alex?’ Carey said.

The door to 810 was ajar. She pushed it open and took in the empty bed, the coverlet still the old chaos, the clock winking from the bedside table. Alex was gone. There was no note.

She took out her phone, and called him, but there was no reply. She thumbed to produce a text message, and typed ‘Sorry’, then after a moment’s thought deleted it and put her phone back into her pocket and left the room.

Where had the money gone? Red Queen did not know, and never would. It vanished in the night. It was ghost money.

It trickled out like river water making its way to the sea across the fan of rills in a wide estuary, through the investment bodies and front organisations, the blind trusts and offshore black holes, the accounting switchbacks and shell companies. Incalculably diffusive was the vanishing of the mysterious Nieman’s holding in MIC, and like a withdrawing tide it left wreckage, glints of tin, the bones of boats, the suck and wheeze of shellfish buried in their holes in the sand.