Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

But it did not disperse. Not exactly. If it was like an estuary, it was an estuary that flowed back towards the river. It found its way into a newly opened numbered account.

And this account had, as if by chance – though nobody knew then – the same number as the account from which, all those years ago, a certain reclusive mathematician was paid a monthly stipend for his research by his contact at MIC. And somewhere far away something began again.

What had happened had happened. Things rolled on. There was nothing in the constitution of the universe that said Alex was meant to be with Carey. Nobody would insulate him against failure, and nothing would indemnify him against loss. He had had an idea about the way his future went that had turned out to be wrong. He had had his chance. He was, after all, alone.

Alex had driven out of Las Vegas in the early morning, when the sun was starting to sear the tarmac and gamblers were emerging caffeinated and shuddering and broke into the bleak light of Fremont Street, on their way to bed, those of them that had beds to go to. The last thing he wanted to do was to say goodbye.

Everything had gone its separate way. He wanted to go home. But he wanted to make a gesture, just to himself – wanted to go somewhere where nobody was looking for him.

He drove up and out of the city towards the west. He had the idea to go to Death Valley. He wanted to be somewhere where he would be a small figure in the landscape.

He drove for an hour, maybe two – the same sort of trance descending on him as the city thinned and disappeared behind him as he had felt in the desert on his way in from the east. His sadness was for a short time something objective, something outside himself. It shared with him, but it wasn’t the whole of him. Some version of him would go home on a plane, would wonder how to persuade the stewardess to give him an extra bottle of red wine with his meal, would look gritty-eyed at Heathrow from the window of a taxiing plane and see familiar greys and all the mundane apparatus of normality. Las Vegas would be a gaudy dream. He and Carey would avoid each other, would have the odd awkward conversation, would pretend to be friends, then eventually would stop needing to pretend and would actually be friends, or at least would be friendly with each other. And at that point it really would have died and no force on earth would be able to magic it back.

Trucks and cars came and went. Traffic was sparse. A police patrol car sat angled in the wide patchwork of dirt and tarmac between the carriageways, waiting for something to happen. Sunshine made the windscreen opaque, then momentarily the angle was right. The patrolman inside had on a wide-brimmed hat, and his head was held unmoving, like a lizard holds its head.

The ring. No need for theatrics. He kept one hand on the steering wheel, sliding it round to the top, where the plastic was sun-hot under his palm. With the other he thumbed the rocker on the door. The window slid down and dusty heat entered the car. To either side and all around the desert was dry heat, marked with dark green foliage and white sticks, dead scrub. Low hills rose on the horizon line, and above them was white, and above that was blue. High thin clouds stood in the air, wisps of smoke rolled into miserly cigarettes.

A large truck came out of the haze, swelled, and closed the gap between them, then whooshed past, guffing hot smoke and turbulent air through the open window into the car. Its canvas back panels, retreating in Alex’s rear-view mirror, said XGS in black-on-white capitals. It thundered away to its destination.

Alex’s window was still down. He pulled the ring out of his pocket and with a single movement threw it out of the open window, high and out to the side of the road. It turned in the air, and the wind was going too loud and the car was too far forward for Alex to hear the high ‘tink’ as the ring hit a rock and skittered into the desert where the chances were that nobody would ever find it again.

Much later, Bree called Red Queen from the airport.

‘There never was a coincidence engine,’ said Bree. ‘Was there? You did it yourself, didn’t you? The whole lot.’

‘You think?’ said Red Queen, ignoring the second half of what Bree said. ‘How do you explain this?’

Bree was in the airport. Red Queen was where – New York?

‘Explain what?’

‘All of this. Everything that happened.’

‘Nothing happened,’ said Bree. ‘You did it – at least until it got out of your control.’

‘Huh?’

‘You knew the Directorate was leaking,’ said Bree. She was testing a theory. She needed to know. ‘You knew MIC would overextend themselves looking for it. The satellite image of the plane, that was you: you cooked it up. Easily done: you control the flow of data; we all know that. The guy in the hospital – what was he, an actor? And the Intercept: to make your photo of the plane plausible; or the photo of the plane, to make the Intercept plausible. The boy knew nothing. Nothing. And the rest of it was just chance.’

‘No,’ said Red Queen. ‘I did cook up the plane – the photograph of the plane, anyway. That was where it started from. Flying a kite. No more than that. But I don’t know anything about the guy in the hospital. And the Intercept was real.’

A pause.

‘Sort of. Took a long while to unravel what had happened to it. It was part of a crappy story this guy was writing. Professor up at MIT. He wrote it as some sort of therapy, is my theory, if you can get therapy for being a very irritating individual. There was a New York agent he’d sent the manuscript too. A guy called Duck. Duck and Hands. Weird. I guess he was using it as scrap paper, anyhow. He happened to fax something the wrong way up – Professor Hands’s golden words. And that was how it came to us. But then it was that same professor I called in to look at the Banacharski material.’

Bree felt, as the conversation went on, an ebbing sense of Red Queen’s responsibility. Did the hurricane do that? Could that have been possible? But even as Bree was pushing the line she had been determined to push, she felt differently. She wanted to know if Red Queen believed, and going on the attack was the way to do it. But she herself felt different. The machine was real, and it had brushed against her. She couldn’t not believe, not now, in the miracle. And the details mattered less and less.

‘So the photograph was fake.’

‘Yes,’ Red Queen said.

‘The plane didn’t appear.’

‘It might have done,’ said Red Queen. ‘Actually, it might have done. But we didn’t photograph it if it did.’ Red Queen said nothing for a bit. Then: ‘We thought the machine didn’t exist, but then we started to worry that perhaps it did. It was the Intercept that made me change my mind. The fact that it had nothing to do with the operation I was running, yet described it so perfectly. And the stripper in the pilot’s outfit? I had nothing to do with him either, if he had anything to do with this. So then I needed to see Hands – who didn’t know anything, as it turned out.’

Bree felt deeply, deeply confused. She formed a mental picture of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

‘But Hands was helpful. Accidentally helpful. He explained that if it could be thought of, it could perhaps exist. Not here – not in this parallel, the chances against that would be inordinately high – but somewhere else. Another parallel where it could have been possible. It could exist. And if it could exist there – it could affect us, it could bleed through. Assuming that here is where we think we are, anyway.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Bree.

‘There’s any number of universes where none of this ever happened. Where none of us even existed. A majority, if I understand it right. There are universes where your favourite food, Bree, is chef salad.’