Chapter 40

I was still holding my finger on the button.

Neither Helen nor Harris rushed me. No one made an unnecessary movement. Even time itself in this isolated underground room seemed to move on a different schedule — viscous, slowed, as if that same April five years ago were still running here and no other time existed.

Somewhere up there, over our heads, a London of many millions went on living. Morning cafés were opening. Drivers swore over the traffic. Clerks hurried to meetings. Someone bought milk on the way home. That whole vast world was functioning right now, in parallel with three people standing motionless in an abandoned underground office around an old analogue dictaphone.

I caught myself in a simple, almost childish thought: if I pressed this button — there would be no way back. Not because a state secret would tumble out of the speaker. But because after this recording I would never again manage to consider myself the clean, innocent person I had obediently been for the last five years.

I turned my gaze to Harris.

"Did you listen to this recording, Thomas?"

He nodded slowly, not raising his eyes:

"Yes. Once."

"To the very end?"

He didn't answer for a long time. At last he said quietly, hoarsely:

"No. Not to the end."

"Why?"

Harris shifted his gaze somewhere toward the empty cable trays on the wall:

"Because after a certain minute he starts speaking in a way... as if his listener is no longer sitting in this room. As if he isn't talking to me."

I felt something small and sharp clench in my chest in a painful spasm:

"To whom, then?"

Thomas looked me straight in the eye — and in that look there was an absolute, naked seriousness:

"To you, Michael. Only to you."

Carefully, trying not to break the silence, Helen drew one of the surviving office chairs up to the table.

"Sit," she said gently.

I sat. The dictaphone lay on the dusty tabletop right in front of me. In the meagre light I could examine in every detail the small scratches on its black plastic body. The PLAY button was polished by the pads of someone's fingers far more than all the other keys.

So it had been pressed most often. Perhaps many times. Perhaps — by me, in another life.

I took a deep breath of the room's dry air. And pressed the button.

Inside the machine a spring mechanism clicked with a familiar metallic sound. The old magnetic tape rustled into motion. For the first few seconds only a soft white noise came from the small speaker — that same analogue hum that can never be confused with a digital recording. A living, physical sound. Real dust of time, fixed onto the tracks.

Then a heavy human breath sounded on the recording.

Very familiar. So familiar that with my whole body I felt the dull, panicked resistance of my own brain — the same one I'd met every time I approached April five years ago.

And at last a voice sounded in the empty room.

"If someone other than Michael has just switched this recording on..." a long pause hung on the tape. "Then absolutely everything has gone completely differently from how we planned."

I slowly raised my head, staring into the space in front of me.

That voice, beyond any doubt, was mine. No doubles. No forgery. It sounded a little younger. A little more confident. It didn't yet have that constant, bone-deep tiredness I'd grown used to hearing in my own intonations over the past weeks. But it was my voice. Absolutely mine. I recognized it from the very first second — not with my mind but with something deeper, that the mind doesn't reach at all.

A short, barely catchable chuckle sounded on the recording. Light. Ironic.

"But if it's you yourself listening to it now..." another pause, filled with the rustle of tape. "Then congratulations. You turned out to be far more stubborn and stupid than I secretly hoped."

Helen glanced at me automatically. I sat absolutely still, afraid to breathe. It seemed to me that one extra movement — and that voice would break off forever.

"Don't try to remember anything artificially," the voice went on evenly. "That's the first and main rule. If you've already started deliberately digging up old memories — stop immediately. You'll only make things worse for yourself."

I clenched my fists under the table until the joints went white.

Too late. Far too late for this advice.

"Second," the voice from the speaker sounded calm and businesslike, as if at a technical briefing. "Under no circumstances trust me."

A tangible silence hung in the meeting room. Helen turned her head sharply toward me. She had probably expected to hear remorse, pleas for help, survival instructions. Anything but this.

"If you're thinking right now that the past Michael Lawson was much smarter or cleaner than today's you — get it out of your head. Don't kid yourself. I was no better than you at all. I simply had the full body of the original information. And that, in the end, is exactly what made me lethally dangerous to those around me."

I closed my eyes. Every word landed precisely where it was meant to. Not in the blocked archives of memory — deeper. In that zone where a person talks to their own conscience with no witnesses.

"On your way here, you've surely fantasized that your main question is to find out who exactly controls the Protocol right now." The voice on the recording sighed. "No. That's not the main question at all. I made exactly the same mistake in my time. The real question goes differently: why did you yourself, voluntarily, in your right mind, agree to forget all of this? When you honestly answer that one — everything else becomes almost unimportant."

In the corner Harris coughed briefly. Very quietly, as if afraid to interrupt the recording.

On the tape a breath sounded again. Then — the characteristic scrape of chair legs on the floor. For a few seconds only measured, unhurried footsteps came from the speaker. Then the voice returned, but now it sounded closer and fuller — as if the man had leaned right up to the microphone.

"And the last thing for today. If Thomas Harris is still alive at the moment you're listening to this tape... please, Michael, don't argue with him. Don't demand the impossible from him. He has already lost this war once. Don't make him lose it a second time."

I turned sharply to Harris.

The old man was crouched by the shelving unit, his face buried in both palms. His thin shoulders under the worn coat trembled faintly, rhythmically. And for the first time in our whole acquaintance I saw that he was crying. Soundlessly, without a single sound. That's how only people cry who have long since forgotten how to ask this world for forgiveness.

A long silence hung on the recording. About a minute. It already seemed to me the cassette had reached the end. But then my past voice said one more sentence — very briefly, in a different tone. Not the tone of an engineer. Not the tone of an author of instructions. Just that of a mortally tired man:

"Forgive him."

I didn't immediately understand who exactly those two words were addressed to. To today's me? To the weeping Harris? To himself, going off into a five-year oblivion?

A sharp mechanical click. The limiter tripped. The tape stopped.

The dictaphone went silent.

Not one of the three of us said a word. Not after a minute, not after two. I sat and stared without looking away at the small transparent window of the cassette, behind which two motionless reels of brown tape had come to rest.

That recording had answered not a single concrete question. It hadn't explained the workings of the Protocol. Hadn't named names. Hadn't given addresses.

But something else had happened.

Until that minute I had been sacredly certain that I was investigating an external crime against myself. Now, for the first time, it became clear: all this time I had been investigating my own, conscious decision.

When I finally reached out to put the machine away, I noticed a tiny bright-red sticker on the inside of the hinged lid of the cassette compartment. The size of a fingernail. On it, in my own calligraphic hand, three words were written:

"Side B matters more."

I looked at that sticker for a long time.

Then I took out the cassette, flipped it over, and put it back in.

Harris raised his head. His face was completely dry — as if there had been no tears at all. Only something remained in his eyes that doesn't dry. He looked at the flipped cassette in my hands, and I saw that he knew. Knew what was there. And that was exactly why, back then, he hadn't listened to the end.

Helen stood a little apart, arms crossed over her chest. She was looking not at the dictaphone and not at Harris. She was looking at me — with the expression you have when watching someone who is about to do something irreversible. And who knows it.

I put my finger on the PLAY button again.

I hesitated for one second.

And pressed.

This time the first few seconds of silence were different — not the noise of tape, but a deliberate, working pause. As if the man on the recording were gathering his thoughts. Or waiting for something inside him to settle.

Then my past voice said — quietly, evenly, without inflection:

"All right. If you've flipped the cassette... then you're ready."

A pause.

"Then listen carefully. I'm going to tell you why I did it. Not what exactly happened — you already know that. But why. Because that is the one thing I couldn't leave on any paper medium. Not in the notebook, not in the planner, not in the margins of ministry ledgers. It couldn't be written. It could only be said aloud. Once. To myself."

The voice on the recording fell silent again. For a few seconds. Long enough for me to think: what if he doesn't go on? What if this is part of the system too — to break off right here?

But he went on.

"I didn't do it because I got scared. And not because I wanted to hide. I did it because at some point I understood: as long as I remember — I'm dangerous. As long as I have full access to what I built, this system will keep working. Not because someone switches it on — but simply because I'll be nearby. Because that's how instruments work. They keep doing what they were made for as long as their creator exists."

The voice changed a little — grew quieter. Almost intimate.

"The only way to stop it is to remove the architect. Not physically. That's not what I mean. Remove the knowledge. Remove the context. Remove the person who understands how all of it works from the inside. And the only person I could entrust that to — is you. The future me. Without memory. Without context. Without access."

I didn't move.

"It wasn't self-sacrifice. Not nobility. It was an engineering calculation. I eliminated the vulnerability that I myself was. And if you're sitting here now, listening to this — then you have a question I was afraid to ask myself back then."

A pause. A long one.

"Was I right?"

The voice on the recording didn't answer. It simply spoke that question — and fell silent. As if the answer wasn't within its remit. As if that was exactly the decision it was handing over to whoever would be listening.

To me.

The tape reached the end. The limiter tripped a second time. The silence became final.

I sat motionless for a very long time. Then I slowly raised my eyes to Harris.

He was looking at me. In his inflamed eyes there was neither a question nor an answer. Only waiting — calm, tired, years long. The waiting of a man who had long ago stopped knowing whether he'd acted rightly, and had accepted that not-knowing as a permanent part of himself.

"Was he right?" I asked him quietly.

Harris was silent for a long time.

"I thought about it every day," he said at last. "For five years."

"And?"

"And every day I thought about it differently."

I nodded. It was an honest answer. Probably the only possible one.

I put the dictaphone away in my pocket. Stood up. Looked at the white archive box, at the dusty desks, at the mug with dried coffee, at the family photograph with the note "Remember to buy milk."

Then I looked at Helen.

She was still standing by the shelving unit. But something in her posture had changed — barely noticeably, but I had already learned to read her. She was looking not at me. She was looking at the cabinet. At the shelf where the box with the dictaphone had stood.

At the shelf next to it.

Where, in the very corner, almost invisible in the dark, stood one more folder. No number. No barcode.

But with a name on the spine.

Her name.

Helen slowly reached out her hand.