Chapter 18

Who wanted us to find that letter?

Up until that moment, as we went down into the stuffy, damp-iron-smelling mouth of the tube station, I'd only been asking myself one question: who wrote it? But now, with the echo of the phone call still ringing in my ears, the question mutated. For the first time, a truly chilling thought cut through.

What if that letter hadn't been written for us at all?

We didn't go down to the platform. Instead we squeezed into the corner of a cramped Turkish takeaway drenched in sickly fluorescent light, right by the entrance to the underground. People were bustling around us, the air thick with the smell of overused fryer oil and cheap spices, but for us all that noise had turned into a dull background hum. Once again, we laid the white A4 sheet, pulled from under the floor of the abandoned office, out on the sticky plastic of the table.

I wasn't reading the line. I was looking at the physical medium itself. And right there, under the merciless neon lights, the engineer's pedantry finally took over.

The paper was too white. Too fresh. It didn't have that faint yellowing or greying that any pulp inevitably picks up after five years sitting in a sealed cable channel. It didn't smell of stale damp. A standard 80-gram office sheet, manufactured at most a few months ago. It had been placed under that carpet very recently.

The caretaker's words surfaced in my head immediately: "About two weeks ago, a man came round here too… Very tired… Looked the place over for ten minutes and left."

The whole picture flipped upside down.

That man, two weeks ago, hadn't come to the empty office to look for traces. He'd come to leave one. Lifted the metal plate, dropped the folded sheet into the empty cable channel, and snapped the cover shut.

This completely changed the direction of the investigation. The question of who was erasing people fell to second place. Now a different, far more dangerous figure stepped onto the stage.

Who was trying to leave traces before they were destroyed for good?

"He's helping us, Michael," Helen argued with me for the first time in a long while, her voice ringing with a dull, desperate stubbornness. "This man is ahead of us. He's leaving markers so we don't go blind."

"No," I cut in sharply, pushing away my untouched cup of tea. "He's not helping. Look closer. Every single time, he ends up at the right point one step ahead of us. And every single time, he leaves exactly enough information for us to take one, precisely defined next step. Not more, not less. It's a measured dose. If he genuinely wanted to lay his cards on the table, he'd have written everything. Addresses, names, passwords. Instead he leaves one line. Why?"

I reached into the grey folder and pulled out every note we'd gathered over these days. Laid them out in a row on the sticky table, like cards in a game of patience.

Check the bottom of the suitcase.

↓

You're looking for the wrong man.

↓

If you're reading this, then we're too late again.

None of these lines explained anything. They gave no answers. They simply steered our route. We were being led down a corridor, crumbs dropped for us with elegant precision.

And that's when I noticed the thing that finally stripped away my illusions. As a programmer, I was used to working with patterns and system micro-defects. I brought my face close to the three sheets. In all three, the font was identical — standard Courier New. But it wasn't about the typeface. On all three sheets, the letter 'e' had a tiny, barely visible white speck in the upper loop — a toner-fusing defect on a laser printer's drum. And a faint, almost invisible vertical streak along the right edge — wear from a worn cartridge.

One printer. One cartridge. One grain.

"He's not leaving clues, Helen," I said, and my voice came out frighteningly calm. "He's writing a manual."

Helen was silent for a long time, looking at the three sheets. For a second, the noise of the takeaway around us seemed to fall away.

"Then…" she raised her darkened eyes to me. "This manual isn't addressed to us. Whoever writes it just knows this chain of events will inevitably bring someone here. To him, we're just the ones executing the algorithm."

She said it as if she weren't afraid. As if she'd already grown used to the fact that the most terrifying things don't shout — they arrive quietly and sit down beside you.

22:45

I went home alone. Helen stayed in Westminster — she needed to try to cross-reference the employee number from the ledger against other sealed archives.

I went up to my floor, my legs leaden with exhaustion. Took out my keys, turned the lock. The door gave way quietly, opening onto a dark hallway smelling of stale coffee.

I dropped my keys onto the side table with a jingle, and was already reaching for the light switch when my eyes caught a white shape on the floor. A heavy envelope lay right at the gap under the front door.

No stamp. No recipient's address. Not a single signature or postmark. It had simply been pushed through into the flat by hand while I was out.

I picked it up. The envelope was cold. I carefully tore open the edge and shook the contents out onto my palm.

There were no documents. No diagrams, no notes, no printouts with tell-tale printer defects. An ordinary glossy photograph, ten by fifteen centimeters, slid onto my palm. A physical, analog print.

I switched on the hallway light. The yellow beam struck the gloss.

The photograph was of me.

Five years ago. I was wearing an old jacket I'd thrown out the winter before last, and the very same watch ticking on my wrist right now. I was standing on the front steps of the grey brick Harris & Croft building in Westminster. Looking straight into the camera lens — open, confident. And smiling. It was the smile of a man who has everything in order, who knows exactly where he is and what he's doing.

But that wasn't the most frightening part.

To my right, his hand resting on my shoulder in a friendly way, stood a man. In his early fifties, tall, in a good suit. Dark hair greying at the temples. Straight posture. The face of a man used to being listened to. We stood side by side, like old acquaintances, like people who shared a common cause.

I didn't know this man.

I looked at him for a long time. Then again. Tried to latch onto anything at all — the shape of his face, a gesture, something in how he held himself. Nothing. A completely unfamiliar man, in a photograph where he stood beside me with his arm around my shoulder.

Someone had circled his face in red marker — thick, careful, almost ceremonial.

Until that night, everything happening had felt like an external threat. Something that erased files, forged signatures in ledgers, changed names in databases — out there, external, not touching me directly. But looking at that glossy piece of paper, I truly understood for the first time: whatever was happening to us wasn't working on computers. It was working on me. On my own memory. On the one thing I'd believed I could still trust.

Five years ago I'd stood next to this man. His hand on my shoulder, he'd looked into the lens right along with me. And I'd smiled. And now his face was as unfamiliar to me as the face of a random passerby outside my window.