Chapter 41

I looked for a long time at the red sticker inside the lid.

"Side B matters more."

It had been stuck on in a hurry, crookedly — one corner had lifted, dried out, was barely holding. The most ordinary office sticker, from those labelling sets sold by the thousand in any stationery shop. But those four words, written in my own hand, now weighed more than all the archive folders I'd dug up over the past weeks.

I raised my eyes to Harris.

"Did you listen to the second side, Thomas?"

He shook his head slowly, with effort.

"No."

"Why? If you kept this cassette all these years..."

He smiled barely perceptibly, very bitterly — and with that smile on his gaunt face he looked for a second like someone else again, someone he'd been long ago:

"Because Side A was a report for the system. Instructions for the survivors. But this side was meant for you alone. I had no moral right to intrude on your most important conversation."

I carefully pressed EJECT. The lid of the cassette compartment flipped open with a dry click.

The old C-60 cassette felt unexpectedly heavy in my hand. Two transparent reels. A dense roll of brown magnetic tape, holding someone else's thoughts in its microscopic oxide particles. The irony of fate was that in the age of total digital control, when ministry servers could wipe any person from the databases in a second, the most reliable and invulnerable way to preserve a living voice turned out to be this prehistoric tape. The magnet held where the digital capitulated.

I flipped the cassette over. Closed the lid. Pressed PLAY.

Again the mechanical clatter of springs. Three or four seconds of soft hiss from the empty track.

And then my voice sounded again.

But this time it was different. Unrecognizably so. There was no businesslike manner in it, no command tone, none of that ringing composure that had run through Side A. It sounded hoarse. Mortally tired. And frighteningly — painfully — human.

"If you've reached this recording after all..." the voice broke off for a second. "Then Thomas Harris turned out to be far more stubborn and more faithful than me."

I turned involuntarily to the old man. He had lowered his head even further, chin buried in the collar of his coat. It felt as if he knew every intonation of this confession in advance. Knew it — and that was exactly why he had never listened to it.

"First of all, Michael... thank you." The voice from the speaker fell silent for a second, as if checking how strange that sounded. "Yes. Exactly that. A plain human thank you. For getting to this point. To this room. Although, to be honest, right up to the very last moment I desperately hoped you wouldn't have to do this. That the system would swallow you whole and you'd live out these five years as an ordinary, foolish, happy nobody."

A quiet rustling sound came on the recording — as if the man had slowly run a palm over his face, trying to shake off a wave of drowsiness. Then a short chuckle. Utterly joyless.

"Funny. Right now I'm talking to a man who carries my name, uses my fingerprints, and looks in the mirror with my eyes. And yet you are already absolutely not me. You're clean."

I felt a dull pain somewhere in my chest. Not from the words — from the intonation. That's how people talk who have already said goodbye to themselves completely, in their minds. Who have signed their own sentence and accepted it.

"While you were piecing this investigation together, you've surely had time to come to hate me," the voice went on. "You think me a coward who ran from responsibility. Or an ambitious idiot. You can consider me a state criminal — I won't argue. You have the right. But there's one thing you don't understand yet, because of your amnesia."

A pause. The tape rustled faintly.

"I ran the Protocol and erased my own memory not at all because I was afraid of responsibility. I did it precisely because I understood all the long-term consequences too well, down to the tiniest mathematical margins."

I automatically held my breath. Beside me Helen dug her fingers into the edge of the table.

"When a person creates a technology capable of destroying a personality without a trace," the voice hammered out, returning to its familiar engineering dryness, "he always makes the same mistake. He thinks the most terrible danger is his weapon falling into the wrong hands. Into the hands of politicians, intelligence services, or madmen. But that's an illusion. The truest danger is that one day this instrument will be needed again by you yourself. By your own hands."

No one in the room moved. Even Harris's hoarse breathing in the corner stopped for a moment.

"I thought I was stronger than my own vanity. I sacredly believed: if the situation got out of control — I'd find the strength in myself to delete the code, forget the algorithm, simply refuse. But I was cruelly mistaken. The human mind will always, in any situation, find a crystal-clear and noble reason to do the thing that absolutely must not be done. For the sake of national security. For the sake of protecting loved ones. For the sake of higher justice. For the sake of love, in the end. A reason will always be found."

A long, heavy exhale came on the recording.

"And that is exactly why, one evening here, in this basement, I realized one simple, murderous thing. I cannot be trusted. At all. Under any circumstances. Even if I am me. Especially if I am me."

Something snapped painfully inside me with a crack — in the deepest layers of consciousness. All these agonizing weeks I had been beating my head bloody, trying to bring back the former, brilliant Michael Lawson. And that very former Michael was right now, from a magnetic tape, in a quiet even voice, explaining to me why that absolutely must not be done.

"You're looking for specific culprits," the voice went on, and hard, dry notes appeared in it. "Don't. The people around us did exactly what humanity always does with good, effective instruments. They found a new use for them. The wheel was invented for a grain cart — it became the basis for the tank. Nuclear physics was developed for cheap energy — it became a bomb. My data-optimization algorithm became..."

He suddenly fell silent. For a long time — some thirty seconds. At one point it seemed to me the tape had broken off. But when the voice sounded again, it had dropped to a barely distinguishable whisper:

"...became the reason I no longer have the moral right to remember my own name."

Slowly, as if through fog, I lowered myself onto the nearest chair. My legs had given out.

"Michael." The voice grew a little louder again. "Right now you want to know only one thing: can it all still be put right? My answer is — it can. There's always a way out. But before you start to act, accept one unpleasant, sobering thing. You still think you're investigating events of the past. You're wrong. The past ended irretrievably for you and me five years ago. Your real investigation begins only today. Right now."

On the recording a wristwatch clicked, mechanically, dryly. As if the man had glanced at the dial before pressing stop.

And the final sentence sounded:

"If this recording physically exists in your hands, and you're sitting in this meeting room... then the Protocol is still working. No one has switched it off."

I jerked my head up sharply and looked at Harris.

The old man nodded very slowly, leadenly. Not because he remembered that sentence from the past. But because he himself had lived through all these five years, confirming its absolute truth every single day.

"Never be afraid of losing your memory," the voice on the recording said this quietly, almost to itself. "That's not frightening — it's only an emptiness. Be afraid of the day when you want it back at any price. Because it's on that day... that you will inevitably become me again."

A loud metallic click of the auto-stop. The tape rustled emptily for a few more seconds. Then the reels came to a dead halt.

I sat motionless, not taking my palm off the machine.

Now I fully understood why Harris had flatly refused to listen to the second side. It gave no answers. It didn't explain the technology. It accused. But it accused not external enemies and not officials. It accused the one who had dictated these words in an empty room five years ago.

The past Michael Lawson wasn't trying to justify himself. He was trying to stop himself.

I slowly removed the cassette from its slot.

And only then, once the plastic body had left the compartment, did I notice something else at the very bottom of the cassette niche. There, neatly folded in four, lay a small yellowed slip of stiff paper. No bigger than a shop receipt.

I lifted it with a fingernail, pulled it out, and unfolded it on my knee.

One short line. In my handwriting.

"Now ask Harris about Anna."

I looked at those words for a long time. Then, very slowly, I raised my eyes to Harris.

The old man was sitting by the shelving unit, looking at me. From his face I saw that he had already understood what was written on the slip. And that he had been waiting for this question. Waiting five years — with the patience you have for things that cannot be hurried.

"Thomas," I said quietly.

"Yes."

"Tell me about Anna."

Harris closed his eyes. Opened them. Looked at me for a long time — the way you look at someone you're about to tell something after which nothing will be the same.

"Sit down, Michael," he said at last. "This isn't a short conversation."