Ken Follett - Code to Zero (2000)

He checked his watch. He had more than an hour until take-off. There was plenty of time. He got out of the car and went to the phone booth.

She picked up fast, as if she was already awake. The hotel operator advised her that the phone charge would be added to her bill, and she said: 'Sure, sure, put him on.'

Suddenly he felt awkward. 'Uh, good morning, Elspeth.'

I'm so glad you called!' she said. I've been out of my mind with worry - what's happening?'

'I don't know where to begin.'

'Are you okay?'

Yes, I'm fine, now. Basically, Anthony caused me to lose my memory, by giving me a combination of electric shock and drugs.'

'Good God. Why would he do a thing like that?'

'He says I'm a Soviet spy.'

'That's absurd.'

'It's what he told Billie.'

'So you've been with Billie?'

Luke heard the note of hostility in Elspeth's yoke. 'She's been kind,' he said defensively. He recalled that he had asked Elspeth to come to Washington and help him, but she had refused.

Elspeth changed the subject. 'Where are you calling from?'

He hesitated. His enemies might easily have tapped Elspeth's phone. 'I don't really want to say, in case someone is listening.'

'All right, I understand. What are you going to do next''

I need to find out what it was that Anthony wanted me to forget'

'How will you do that?'

'I'd rather not say over the phone.'

Her voice betrayed exasperation. 'Well, I'm sorry you can't tell me anything.'

'Matter of feet, I called to ask you some things.'

'Okay, fire away.'

'Why can't we have children?'

'We don't know. Last year, you went to a fertility specialist, but he couldn't find anything wrong. A few' weeks ago, I saw a woman doctor in Atlanta. She ran some tests. We're waiting for the results.'

'Would you tell me how we came to get married?'

'I seduced you.'

'How?'

'I pretended to have soap in my eye, in order to make you kiss me. It's the oldest trick in the book, and I'm embarrassed that you fell for it'

He could not tell whether she was being amusing, or cynical, or both. 'Tell me what the circumstances were, how I proposed.'

'Well, I didn't see you for years, then we met again in 1954, in Washington,' she began. 'I was still with the CIA. You were working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but you flew in for Peg's wedding. We were seated together at the breakfast' She paused, remembering, and he waited patiently. When she resumed, her voice had softened. 'We talked and talked - it was as if thirteen years had never happened, and we were still a couple of college kids with all of life ahead of us. I had to leave early - I was conductor of the 16th Street Youth Orchestra, and we had a rehearsal. You came with me ...'

.

1954

The children in the orchestra were all poor, and most of them were black. The rehearsal took place at a church hall in a slum neighbourhood. The instruments were begged, borrowed, and bought from pawnshops. They were rehearsing the overture from a Mozart opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Against the odds, they played well.

Elspeth was the reason. She was an exacting teacher, noticing every raise note and rhythmic misstep, but she corrected her pupils with infinite patience. A tall figure in a yellow dress, she conducted the orchestra with enormous verve, her red hair flying, her long, elegant hands drawing the music from them with passionate gestures.

The rehearsal lasted two hours and Luke sat through the whole thing, mesmerized. He could see that all the boys were in love with Elspeth and all the girls wanted to be like her.

'These children have as much music in them as any rich kid with a Steinway in the drawing room,' she said in the car afterwards. 'But I get into lots of trouble.'

'Why, for God's sake?'

I'm called a nigger-lover,' she said. 'And it's pretty much ended my career at the CIA.'

'I don't understand.'

'Anyone who treats Negroes like human beings is suspected of being a communist. So I'll never be more than a secretary. Not that it's a great loss. Women never get higher than case officer anyway.'

She took him to her place, a small, -uncluttered apartment with a few pieces of angular modern furniture. Luke made martinis and Elspeth started to cook spaghetti in the tiny kitchen. Luke told her about his job.

'I'm so happy for you,' she said with generous enthusiasm. You always wanted to explore outer space. Even back at Harvard, when we were dating, you used to talk about it.'

He smiled. 'And in those days, most people thought it was a foolish dream of science-fiction writers,'

'I guess we still can't be sure it will happen.'

'I think we can,' he said seriously. 'The big problems were all solved by German scientists in the war. The Germans built rockets that could be fired in Holland and land on London.'

'I was there, I remember - we called them buzz-bombs.' She shuddered briefly. 'One nearly killed me. I was walking to my office in the middle of an air raid, because I had to brief an agent who was to be dropped into Belgium a few hours later. I heard a bomb go off behind me. It makes a horrible noise like crump, then there's the sound of breaking glass and masonry collapsing, and a kind of wind full of dust and little bits of stone. I knew that if I turned around to look, I'd panic and throw myself to the ground, and just curl up in a ball with my eyes shut So I looked straight ahead and kept walking.'

Luke was moved by the picture of the young Elspeth walking through the dark streets as the bombs fell around her, and he felt grateful that she had survived. 'Brave woman,' he murmured.

She shrugged. 'I didn't feel brave, just scared.'

'What did you think about''

'Can't you guess?'

He recalled that whenever she was idle she thought about math. 'Prime numbers?' he hazarded.

She laughed. 'Fibonacci's numbers.'

Luke nodded. The mathematician Fibonacci had imagined a pair of rabbits that produced two offspring every month, offspring that began to breed at the same rate one month after birth, and asked how many pairs of rabbits there would be after a year. The answer was 144, but the number of pairs of rabbits each month was the most famous - sequence of numbers in mathematics: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 ..-. You could always work out the next number by adding up the previous two.

Elspeth said: 'By the time I got to my office, I had worked out the fortieth Fibonacci number.'

'Do you remember what it is?'

'Of course: one hundred and two million, three hundred and thirty-four thousand, one hundred and five. So, our missiles are based on the German buzz-bombs?'

'More on their V2 rocket, to be exact' Luke was not supposed to talk about his work, but this was Elspeth, and anyway she probably had a higher security rating than he did. 'We're building a rocket that can take off in Arizona and explode in Moscow. And, if we can do that, we can fly to the moon.'

'So it's just the same thing on a larger scale?'

She showed more interest in rocketry than any other girl he had ever met. 'Yes. We need larger engines, more efficient fuel, better guidance systems, that kind of thing. None of these problems are insurmountable. Plus, those German scientists are working for us now.'

'I think I heard that.' She changed the subject 'And what about life in general? Are you; dating someone?'

'Not right now.' He had dated several girls since his break-up with Billie nine years ago, and had slept with some of them, but the truth - which he did not want to tell Elspeth - was that none had meant much.

There had been one woman he might have loved, a tall girl with brown eyes and wild hair. She had the kind of energy and joie de vivre that he loved about Billie, He had met her at Harvard while he was doing his doctorate. Late one evening, as they strolled together through Harvard Yard, she had taken his hands and said: 'I have a husband.' Then she had kissed him and walked away. That was the nearest he had come to giving his heart.