Chapter 34

I woke up long before the alarm.

For a while I lay motionless, staring into the grey pre-dawn murk of the bedroom, trying to catch what exactly had pulled me out of sleep. No sharp sound from the street. No nightmare. Just a strange, purely physiological sensation — as if some huge background operation had just silently finished inside my skull.

On the bedside table the brass key numbered 317 gave off a dull gleam.

Over the night it hadn't become an inch clearer. But it had finally stopped seeming like a chance find.

The morning coffee came out disgusting.

My thoughts were so far from domestic life that I forgot to turn off the burner, and the water almost completely boiled away in the moka pot. The heavy smell of scorched metal instantly filled the kitchen.

Any normal person would have poured that black sludge into the sink. I poured it into a cup anyway and drank it to the bottom, scalding my tongue. Sometimes a person feels he's simply obliged to see even a knowingly bad decision through to the end. It's probably from that kind of stubbornness that the largest life catastrophes are born.

Helen arrived around nine.

She looked noticeably worse than usual — but it wasn't the familiar tiredness from working with documents. As if, over one exhausting night, she had somehow unnaturally lost all her archival hardness. I noticed that for the first time in our whole acquaintance she hadn't put on mascara. A silly, utterly trivial detail — but it was exactly that smudged little omission that suddenly made her real. Not a cold auditor and not a reluctant partner in an investigation. Just a tired woman who was also at her limit.

She silently set two large paper cups on the table, with the logo of the café by the Tube station.

"Here. This is real coffee."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. Your own, judging by the smell from the hallway, has already mercilessly killed someone today."

For the first time in days I smiled despite myself — just a little, with the corners of my mouth. Helen answered in kind. The smile vanished from her face almost at once, washed away by a new wave of anxiety — but it had managed to happen. Between us.

"Did you check the number?" she nodded at the brass key.

"No."

"Why?"

I looked for a long time at the thin thread of steam above the cup.

"I'm afraid, Helen."

She wasn't surprised. She only nodded, understanding.

"It is strange, though," she said quietly, looking out the window.

"What exactly?"

"Before, more than anything in the world you were afraid someone would find you and erase you. And now you're in a panic about finding something yourself."

Those words stayed with me all the rest of that day.

We started with the obvious — station left-luggage lockers. First we went to Victoria, then checked Paddington, then Charing Cross. Nowhere in those colossal transport hubs had mechanical keys like this been in use for a long time. All the lockers had gone electronic. The brass number 317 opened nothing.

There followed a long, gruelling string of old municipal swimming baths, district archives, closed libraries, several private clubs in the suburbs. All to no result.

By evening my legs were humming. London was taking on its usual leaden colour, sliding smoothly into dusk.

We were sitting on a wooden bench under the glass canopy of a bus stop. Surprisingly, there was no rain. Helen turned to me unexpectedly:

"Can I ask you a deeply personal question?"

"There's nothing left to lose anyway."

She couldn't bring herself to for a long time — bit her lips, looked somewhere past me. Then she said it after all:

"Before all this... before October, before the amnesia and Harris... were you truly happy?"

That question hit more unexpectedly and more painfully than any of the documents we'd found. I thought about it — for a long time, honestly.

Fragments surfaced before my eyes: that group photo where Harris and I are smiling into the lens, Anna, Friday evenings at the pub, work at the ministry, a stable home. The most ordinary, comfortable life of a successful Londoner.

And at the same time — the heavy bottle of single-malt whisky I opened more and more often alone. Insomnia. And that sticky, unrelenting sense that somewhere deep inside, something was slowly, creakingly breaking.

"No," I said at last.

"Why?"

"Because I kept thinking I'd become happy a little later. Once I finished this hard project. Once I earned enough. Once I fixed one more system error." I looked her straight in the eye. "And you?"

Helen smiled — very sadly, with her eyes only:

"All my life I did nothing but put it off until later, too."

For a while we sat in silence, listening to the hum of the occasional cab. Then she took out her phone, glanced at the screen — and instantly put it back in her pocket. But I managed to see, for a fraction of a second: a young, dark-skinned guy with laughing eyes against bright southern sun. An open smile straight into the lens.

"Who's that?" I asked quietly.

She was quiet. Then she shrugged — vaguely, almost defensively:

"Nobody."

A short pause.

"Or rather... a person who, in my reality, will most likely never exist anymore. We've been writing to each other for a few months. He lives in Dubai. Younger than me. Very light, funny. Sometimes I thought I was starting to believe him. And then I come back to myself and remember how many people know how to be absolutely perfect when there are thousands of miles between you."

I said nothing. I understood her too well. Sometimes a person holds on to an obviously impossible story not because they believe in it. But simply because that illusion lets them, for a couple of hours a day, not feel their freezing loneliness.

The bus never came. We walked on foot through the emptying neighbourhoods.

Almost right at my house, Helen's phone vibrated briefly in her pocket. She mechanically took it out on the move, glanced at the screen — and suddenly stopped dead, right in the middle of the pavement.

I saw her face go deathly pale in a fraction of a second in the light of the streetlamps flaring on.

"What is it?"

She didn't answer. Silently, with a trembling hand, she turned the display toward me.

On the screen glowed the open chat with the contact "Mo." But all those hundreds of messages, media files, and links that just that morning had made up several months of their correspondence — were gone. As if they'd never been. In the middle of a pristine grey field, one short system line burned:

"Message history unavailable."

"No... no, this can't be," she whispered, gasping.

She started feverishly refreshing the app. Then again. Tried to open his personal profile. Before our eyes the avatar shrank into a grey default circle. The photograph vanished. The name was wiped. This account no longer existed in the system — deleted at the root, along with all the backup servers.

For a long time — about a minute — she looked at that empty, dead piece of plastic in her hands. Then, very calmly, frighteningly calmly, she locked the screen and put the phone in her pocket.

"The Protocol," she said quietly, without a single emotion. "It's already here, Michael. Cleaning up the loose ends around me."

I didn't try to reassure her. Didn't say the usual stupid things. Because at moments like that any consolation sounds like an insulting lie.

We simply turned and walked on. Slowly. Along the dark, almost empty street, where the wheels of the occasional car hissed now and then, and the streetlamps reflected in the wet asphalt in long orange stripes.

I was thinking about Helen — about the fact that what she had just lost was not a piece of evidence or an archive file. She had lost the only living voice that, over the past months, had spoken to her as a person, not as a vanishing line in a registry. The Protocol chose its targets flawlessly. It always knew exactly what to take first.

And suddenly — obeying some inexplicable impulse — I raised my head and looked at the opposite side of the road.

There, right under the dim yellow cone of light from the old bus stop, a man stood motionless.

A long dark coat with the collar turned up. Worn shoes. A classic walking-stick umbrella carelessly gripped in one hand. Stooped shoulders, tilted slightly forward — not from tiredness, but from a years-long habit of being a little smaller than the space around him.

He wasn't hiding behind the shelter's frame. Wasn't retreating into the dark of an alley. Wasn't dropping off another note.

He was simply standing and looking at us across the road. Openly. Directly. Almost wearily — the way a man looks who has waited too long for this minute and has now finally let himself breathe out.

My heart first skipped a beat wildly, then pounded twice as hard somewhere in my throat. I recognized that silhouette instantly, even in the gloom. Recognized it by the slope of the shoulders, by the walking-stick umbrella, by the way he stood — as if he'd grown used, over many years, to taking up as little room as possible in this world.

"Helen," I breathed hoarsely, grabbing her sleeve. "Look over there."

She turned instantly.

But by the time she turned — the opposite side of the street was already completely empty. Only a massive red double-decker bus was slowly pulling away from the stop with a heavy hydraulic sigh, folding its glass doors shut behind it.

I watched the disappearing tail lights and understood one thing.

Thomas Harris was no longer hiding. He had let me see him himself. He had chosen the moment, stepped out of the shadow — for exactly as long as was needed for me to understand: he was here. That he had been here all this time.

The string was drawn to its limit.

Tomorrow it had to snap.