Chapter 38

The next morning Thomas Harris was already waiting for us.

No advance note. No conspiratorial call from a burner SIM. No new riddle to be puzzled out over hours. He simply sat on that same bench by the embankment, holding a paper cup of long-cold, untouched coffee motionless in both chilled palms.

When our footsteps crunched on the gravel, he slowly raised his head.

"Good morning," he said so matter-of-factly, as if for the past five years we had been meeting at this exact spot at nine o'clock sharp.

"Today?" I asked shortly.

"Today."

"Where are we going?"

Harris looked in silence for a while at the swaying river haze. Then he answered quietly:

"Home, Michael. We're going home."

The journey took almost forty minutes.

First — the crowded, stuffy carriages of the Underground. Then a half-empty suburban train carrying us away from the centre. Then a battered double-decker bus. The capital dissolved beyond the windows reluctantly, layer by layer: glass towers gave way to dreary rows of brick houses, those were replaced by the concrete hangars of warehouses — until a half-abandoned industrial zone stretched out around us.

The bus braked beside a low, elongated complex of grey breeze-block concrete.

No three-metre fences with barbed wire. No paramilitary guards in camouflage. No dome cameras aimed straight at your face. Everything looked frighteningly ordinary. On the building's facade an old plastic sign hung crooked, half its letters peeled and faded. It could still be made out, though:

"National Centre for the Analysis and Structuring of Government Data."

I turned to Harris, feeling a strange sting of disappointment.

"Here? This is where it all happened?"

He nodded silently.

"Right here."

If it hadn't been for his direct instruction, I would never in my life have given this building a second glance. A completely standard administrative box from the late nineties. There are thousands of them scattered across the country. It was too dull, too grey and faceless for the eye to catch on it and remember.

The main door of the central entrance had been nailed shut crosswise with thick boards. This had been done not for reasons of secrecy — the complex had simply been decommissioned a few years ago and mothballed. The paint on the ground-floor window frames had bubbled and flaked away in places. Hard, dry weeds pushed up through the cracks in the asphalt.

Harris confidently led us around the main block. Round the corner, into the back yard — to the service technical entrance. The heavy metal door there turned out to be ajar. Judging by the layer of leaves in the gap, people had simply stopped locking it and left it to time.

Inside it smelled of dust.

Not the bog damp of a basement, not rot. Exactly old, dry, stagnant paper dust. That's how archive rooms and offices smell when no one has disturbed or aired them for many years.

We climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor. A long corridor. Flaking white walls. Cheap ceiling panels, sagging in places. On the doors, yellowed plastic plates had survived.

"Laboratory 2." "Archive Sector." "Server Room." "Meeting Room No. 4."

The most ordinary, clerical, sterile words.

"Right here..." Harris stopped in the middle of the corridor and coughed into his fist. "Here you and I shook hands for the first time, Michael."

I automatically looked around. Nothing. My mind stayed pristinely clear.

"Were you expecting to see a high-tech underground bunker?" Thomas smiled sadly, noticing my expression.

"Something along those lines," I admitted.

"No. It was the most ordinary government project with a shoestring budget at the start. Ordinary staff with tea in mugs. Ordinary tedious budget meetings. Ordinary unpaid overtime in the evenings, because we burned with the idea. The most terrible, most destructive things in the history of humanity almost always start exactly like this. Insultingly boring."

We pushed a double door and entered a large room in the pale morning light.

Once a spacious open-plan office had been housed here. Now only ghostly traces of it remained. On the grey linoleum floor — dark faded squares where programmers' desks had stood for years. On the walls — white rectangular patches from whiteboards. On the ceiling — bare brackets for projectors.

I suddenly stopped in the middle of the dead hall.

It was a strange, frightening physiological sensation — my body recognized this room far earlier than my blocked memory managed to. Not a memory. A reflex.

Harris watched closely, without looking away, for the slightest changes in my expression.

"Anything?"

"No. No picture. But..."

I took one more step forward, and under my sole the old linoleum creaked quietly, with a characteristic plastic sound.

A completely ordinary, everyday sound. But it was that penny-cheap creak that, like a detonator, set off a sharp, blinding flash in my brain.

A brief one. One second long.

A large white board. I'm holding a black marker in my fingers. I'm standing in front of a group of people in unbuttoned shirts, explaining something with animation, raising my voice, drawing branching schematics of an algorithm. Someone in the back row laughs. Harris sits to my right, nodding approvingly and making notes in a pad.

The flash went out before I could make out even one face.

I swayed and grabbed sharply at the edge of a broken desk by the wall. Helen was instantly beside me, catching me under the elbow.

"Michael? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. It's passed." I took a deep, convulsive breath, wiping cold sweat. "I really did work here. I was physically in this room."

Harris didn't look surprised. Only a deep, age-old sorrow was reflected in his eyes.

"Of course you were. This is your former office. Your territory."

We went behind a dividing partition.

Behind it was a small isolated meeting room. A round wooden table. Six office chairs. One of them lay on its side — judging by the layer of dust on its legs, it had fallen there on the day of the hasty evacuation and had never been picked up since. On the wall a large magnetic board still hung. Absolutely blank. I automatically went over and ran my palm across it — my fingertips instantly turned a dirty white.

"Right here, at this table," Harris said quietly behind my back, "you once said a sentence I sincerely hate to this day."

I turned.

"Which one?"

He answered instantly, without the slightest pause — as if he'd been replaying this dialogue in his head every night:

"You looked at my doubts and said: 'Thomas, understand a simple thing. If a mathematical instrument is possible in principle — sooner or later someone will build it anyway. So better we do it, carefully and under control, than someone else in the dark.'"

I closed my eyes.

Inside, somewhere around the solar plexus, something trembled painfully and dully. That logic was frighteningly familiar to me. Not as a memory — as a structure of thinking. As the architecture by which I make decisions to this day.

"Did you really think that, Michael?" Helen asked quietly.

I was silent for a long time, looking at my dust-smeared fingers. Then I answered as honestly as I could:

"I don't know. I don't remember. But if these really are my words... then at that moment they seemed absolutely reasonable to me."

Harris went over to the far, windowless wall of the meeting room, finished with cheap panels imitating limed oak. He stopped. He peered closely at the joints. Then he suddenly knocked on the surface with his knuckles.

A sound came. Too hollow, vibrating. There, behind the cladding, an emptiness was hidden.

I looked at Thomas questioningly.

He nodded almost imperceptibly.

"Well, that's it, Michael. Now you can use your key."

I slowly took the small brass key numbered 317 out of my pocket. Until this second it had remained a cold souvenir from someone else's past to me. Now, for the first time, with frightening clarity, it became clear: it opens the door to the finale.

I went right up to the wall. I slowly ran my palm over the rough paint. Nothing. Again, a little lower, at the join of the panels.

And suddenly my fingers felt a barely noticeable gap and a tiny metal plate — a little larger than a postage stamp. In its centre was a narrow dark keyhole.

I fitted the key in. The brass metal slid softly into the slots to the stop, as if oiled.

I turned it.

A quiet, dry, metallic click sounded.

That same second the massive wall shuddered. Somewhere deep beneath the concrete floors a long-forgotten hydraulic mechanism started up with a grinding sound. From the ceiling, a thin trickle of century-old dust sifted down onto our shoulders. Behind the wall something heavy moved — like a huge beast waking reluctantly after five years of hibernation.

Down the middle of the grey panel a narrow vertical line cut open. It rapidly grew wider, darker, moved off to the right. The panel was sliding aside.

Until, before our eyes, a steep, narrow passage opened up, with concrete steps going far down, into impenetrable darkness. From that black opening a sharp, cold, absolutely dry air breathed into our faces.

Not staleness. Not damp. Not death.

The clean air of a sealed room that had waited too long, patiently and faithfully, for the return of its creator.

Harris stayed where he was. He didn't take a single step toward the opened passage. He only turned his tired gaze on me and said quietly:

"From here on, Michael... from here on you have to go in first."

I looked into the darkness of the stairwell.

And suddenly I clearly grasped one paradoxical thing.

All the previous thirty-seven chapters — all the searches, the chases, the decipherings of notes, the till receipts, the graphite traces on paper, the brass key, the stamped number 317 — all of it had been only a preface. A long, exhausting, necessary preface.

My real story was only beginning now.

Down there, below, in the darkness.

I took the first step.

14:01