Chapter 17

We'd almost reached the glass pavilions of Westminster station when the phone came alive in my jacket pocket.

A dry, sharp buzz. On the screen glowed an empty grey line — "Number withheld." My finger was already hovering over the red icon, about to decline, when Helen caught my arm. Her cold fingers closed tightly around my wrist, her eyes ordering:

"Answer it."

I let out a breath and pressed the phone to my ear.

"Lawson."

For a few seconds, absolute silence reigned on the other end. Then heavy, rasping breath reached me. And a man's voice — very quiet, flat, stripped of any intonation, as if the man were spending enormous effort just pushing air through his vocal cords:

"Are you still looking for Thomas Harris?"

I froze in the middle of the pavement. Helen stopped the same instant. She couldn't hear the words coming through the speaker, but she understood everything from my face — from how my jaw instantly turned to stone.

"Who's speaking?" I tried to make my voice as level as possible.

A pause. Long, viscous.

"That makes absolutely no difference right now, Michael."

He'd used my first name. Not "Mr. Lawson," not "sir" — just Michael. The way you address people you've known a long time. People you knew before they forgot themselves.

"Where did you get this number?" I stepped back, pressing against a brick wall. "It's not in any active City database."

A short, dry sound came from the other end of the line. Something like a laugh. Very tired, and bitter.

"Michael… if I'd wanted to, I could have called you on this exact number five years ago. On the very day you first walked through the door of the office in Kensington."

Everything inside me frosted over at once. This man knew me. Had known the trajectory of my life long before this entire nightmare broke loose. Not from a database — from memory. Living, unrewritten memory.

"What do you want?"

"From you? Nothing. I've stayed silent too long. Watched reality melt for too long. Now, I think, it's my turn to talk."

I shifted my grip on the phone, catching Helen's eye.

"Is Harris alive?" I asked, point blank.

The breathing on the line broke off for a second, growing even heavier. Then — a strained cough, short, suppressed. The very cough into a handkerchief the caretaker had just mentioned. I was hearing it for the second time today. The first time — from his mouth, retold in someone else's words. Now — directly, down the line, in my ear.

Something inside me began to turn, slowly, with a grinding creak.

"Yes," the voice answered at last.

I closed my eyes. For the past weeks, Helen and I had been operating on a single axiom: Thomas Harris had vanished, been scrubbed from the registries, and therefore was physically gone. And now that entire carefully built chain of logic collapsed on a single short, hoarse word.

"Where is he?" I asked quickly. "If he's alive, where do I find him?"

The answer came without hesitation:

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? You just said—"

"Exactly what I said, Michael." For a second, something entered the voice that I couldn't identify right away. Not tiredness. Something deeper — like the pain of a man used to speaking precisely, now forced to speak this way because it's the only thing that remains true. "Thomas Harris is alive. His heart is physically beating, he walks these streets. But I no longer know which of the people I meet in the crowd every day is actually him."

I felt icy dread run down my spine. This was beyond comprehension.

"Explain. What does that mean?"

"I can't," the voice cut him off. "If I explain it to you now, you'll simply stop. Give up and quit looking. And you need to keep looking. All the way to the end."

"Then why did you even call?!" My composure cracked, and I dropped into a low growl. "What's the point of this conspiracy-theory routine?"

A long, suffocating pause stretched out. I could hear the man on the other end cough hard again — and suppress it the way you suppress something shameful you don't want anyone to see. And then he spoke a line that settled in my head like a dead weight, driving out every other thought:

"Because right now, you're repeating my own mistakes, step for step."

A pause. One second.

"And I couldn't stay silent a second time."

There was a short click on the line. The connection died.

We stood motionless under the wide concrete overhang of the tube station for another ten minutes or so. The rain behind us picked up with new force, turning the London evening into one solid grey wall. Streams of water rushed noisily over the asphalt, people hurried past us with their faces hidden under umbrellas. But Helen and I stayed fixed points in this landscape that no longer belonged to us — as if the two of us had, at the same moment, run out of the ability to move at the same pace as everything around us.

I told her the whole conversation. Almost word for word, trying to keep even the intonations and pauses of that hoarse, exhausted voice. Helen listened in silence, without interrupting, only her fingers tightening further around the strap of her bag.

When I finished, she studied my eyes for a long time. Then she asked only one thing:

"What scared you the most, out of all of it?"

I didn't answer right away. Took out a cigarette, tried to light it, but the lighter had gotten damp, so I just turned the little roll of tobacco between my fingers, then threw it in a bin.

"Not that Harris is alive," I said quietly. "Not even that this man knows my personal number and remembers me from five years back. What frightened me to the bone was the ending. His last line."

"'You're repeating my mistakes'?"

"No. The last one."

Helen frowned slightly.

"'I couldn't stay silent a second time,'" I repeated. "You hear it? A second time. He stayed silent the first time. Five years ago. When he could still have changed something."

Helen was quiet for a long time, watching raindrops shatter against the granite curb, scattering into tiny drops that vanished instantly, as if they'd never existed. Then, almost in a whisper, barely audible over the roar of a passing train, she said:

"So… there was already an investigation, before us. Someone found this exact camera, the same way. Went to the photo lab in Camden, the same way. Stood in that empty office on the third floor and looked at the flattened square of carpet, the same way."

We turned and looked at each other at the same instant. For the first time in this whole chase — not as people bound together by shared trouble. But as two people who'd suddenly understood, with clean, mathematical clarity: we weren't the first ones through here. We were simply walking in someone else's deep footprints, through thick fog.

And the most terrifying part was that those footprints might not end somewhere up ahead, at a point of triumphant revelation.

They'd already broken off, long ago. Right where we were standing.