Chapter 46

I had never thought before that waiting could have its own tangible sound.

Helen and I sat on rickety chairs in the small Camden photo lab. Around us thickened the heavy, biting smell of chemical reagents and old paper. Under the ceiling a fan turned lazily, unsuccessfully circulating the stale air. In front of my eyes the scratched wooden counter glowed yellow.

The elderly photographer hadn't uttered a word since we arrived. He'd simply taken the camera in silence and disappeared behind the dark curtain. From behind the screen came, from time to time, the metallic clink of developing tanks, the steady splash of water — and sometimes nothing, a dull, ringing emptiness.

The familiar linear time had finally ceased to exist for me. I couldn't tell how many minutes had flowed past — ten, or half an eternity.

Helen sat beside me, pale, frozen. Sometimes her thin fingers mechanically touched the grey archive folder on her lap — an empty cardboard shell that the Protocol had swept clean of all its contents.

At last the curtain stirred with a dull rustle.

The old photographer came out with a slow, heavy step. In his hands he carefully held a thick white envelope — no stamp, no writing, no index. He set it neatly on the counter in front of me.

But he didn't let go at once. His knotted fingers, stained with developer, pressed on the paper for a few more seconds, holding it in place.

"You know, son..." he said quietly, with an age-old sorrow, looking me straight in the eye. "Sometimes it's far more merciful for a person to remember not everything."

I nodded slowly, feeling my throat tighten.

"I know, sir. I know now."

He let go of the envelope and stepped back. For a long time I looked at the white paper. Then I took it with trembling fingers and opened it.

Inside lay a stack of exactly twenty-four glossy photographs.

I began to leaf through them slowly.

London in a haze. Westminster Bridge on an overcast day. Harris — alive, laughing at something I would now never remember. Helen — noticeably younger, with an open face, no shadows under her eyes, standing on the steps of an archive building and talking animatedly on the phone. She's smiling in this shot as if she still believes that any system error in the world can be fixed with a memo filed in time.

At the tenth frame I stopped counting.

Thomas Harris had been right. The first twenty-three shots explained nothing — no codes, no ciphers, no revelations. They simply proved one terrible, undeniable thing: we had all once had our own real human life. Before it came to its finale.

The last photograph lay a little apart. Turned face down.

As if even the photographer — who had seen thousands of other people's lives — hadn't dared to look at it first.

I took a deep breath. I hooked a finger under the stiff card and turned the shot face up to the light.

In the photograph was me.

I was sitting at the massive oak table in that underground office. In front of me lay the yellow Kodak camera, the black notebook, and the old cassette dictaphone. I was looking straight into the lens. Without the sticky fright. Without doom. Without panic.

Calmly. Deliberately. That's how a man looks who fully understands the true price of his final decision.

In my right hand in the shot I was holding a white sheet of paper in front of me. On it, large, in my own handwriting, was written one sentence:

"If you've reached this frame after all — then you turned out to be much stronger than me."

For a long time I studied the features of my own face. Then I turned the shot over. On the back there was nothing — no instructions, no coordinates, no last great secret. Only a small, neat date in the very corner.

17 April.

And then I understood.

My past double hadn't spelled anything out not because he'd run out of time. He had consciously, deliberately refused to explain. He didn't want to leave me ready-made answers. He left me something far more valuable — the right to make my own decision myself. Exactly as he had made his, five years ago, at that table.

Helen had been silently watching my hands all this time.

"What's there, Michael?" she asked quietly. "What's on the photo?"

I smiled at her — wearily, but sincerely.

"Now I finally understand who he was."

"Who?"

"Just a man. Just as frightened, just as cornered. But certain, right to the end, that he was making the only right choice." I paused. "That turned out to be the most terrifying discovery of the whole investigation."

We came out onto the Camden street.

Spring London went on living with a pointed, almost insulting serenity. Buses. Passers-by with coffee to go. A street vendor calling out the headlines of the morning papers. A huge city of millions of people who would never know how fragile the existence of a single person can be in the digital registries.

Helen stopped at the edge of the junction.

"What are we going to do now, Michael?"

I looked at her. Then at the grey London sky. Then I slowly took the old black notebook out of my pocket and turned it to the very last blank page.

For a long time I held the tip of the pen over the paper, watching the shadow of a passing cab fall across it. And for the first time in all this long time I wrote not to my past double and not to a hypothetical future successor. I wrote to myself — real, alive, standing on this asphalt:

"Your own memory does not yet make a person innocent before the past. But without it you can't do the most important thing — ask forgiveness of those you left behind."

I closed the notebook.

Thomas Harris died quietly in his sleep a week after those events.

Not a single London newspaper wrote about it. His name appeared neither in the news bulletins nor in the crime pages. No one reported him missing. Two people attended the funeral — me and Helen.

The parish priest asked us the deceased's surname several times, apologetically, checking against his tablet. In the official death documents, instead of Harris's personal details, there was an absolutely blank space. Helen and I exchanged a glance and didn't correct anything. There was no longer any point in it.

A month later Helen left the Ministry. No one in the Department of Audit tried to keep her. The HR office processed everything in a few minutes. It gave the complete, frightening impression that she had never worked in that huge grey building at all.

Sometimes in the evenings, in small cafés by the river, she messaged with Mo from Dubai. Sometimes she smiled warmly at the glowing screen. And sometimes she'd suddenly put the phone down, look at the water, and say aloud — quietly, as if testing her own strength:

"You know, Michael... Maybe I should take the risk after all. Buy a ticket and just fly out there."

I never asked what exactly she meant by the word "risk." I myself had long since stopped hunting for the guilty and building theories. Not because I'd found all the answers. But because over these months I had clearly understood one fundamental difference.

There are things that can be professionally investigated by collecting evidence. And there are tragedies you simply have to learn to go on living with. They're not the same thing.

Sometimes, walking past the shop windows on Piccadilly, I'd catch my reflection in the glass completely by chance. And every time, for an elusive fraction of a second, it seemed to me that another man was walking beside me, shoulder to shoulder. A little younger. With a calmer face. He never said anything. Gave no advice. He simply looked ahead in silence, in the direction of our shared route.

And for some reason, beside him, I was never truly afraid again.

That same evening I sat by the window, opened the old black notebook, and began slowly turning the written pages.

I reached the last sheet. Turned it over.

On the endpaper, where there should have been blank paper, there was a short entry. In a sharp, angular hand — not my present one, but that other one, which I had already learned to tell apart from my own.

The handwriting of five years ago.

From the days when the Protocol was only preparing to strike its first blow.

I closed my eyes for a second. Then opened them. Read it again.

"If you're reading these lines after all — then you and I are hopelessly too late again."

For a long time I sat motionless, holding the notebook in my hands.

Outside the window London was slowly going into night. Soundlessly. Indifferently. The way everything goes that has waited too long.

I closed the notebook.