Chapter 18 The Unmaking

The four days passed like days in a hospital, each one the same length and none of them ordinary. Kolm watched from inside. He did not search the section chief's office and did not follow him through the building; he did the smaller, dirtier thing, which was to log the movements of one page. Each morning he noted the hour the document in the section chief's tray was opened and the hour it was closed. Each evening he noted whether the tray had been emptied or left. On the second day the tasking moved to the deputy director's office for a signature and came back; on the third it sat; and on the fourth morning, before the building had properly woken, the section chief signed it and put it in the pouch, which is what a section chief does with every tasking, and which proved nothing at all. Astrid noticed the floor before anyone else, because Astrid noticed everything and said little. On the third day she found Kaisa in the corridor by the tube station and stood in her path without malice. "The section chief is quiet," Astrid said. "Quiet since Tuesday. The deputy director has been walking the long way past the fourth desk all week, and the registry has been asked for the green book twice, which happens once a decade. I am not asking what you are doing. I am asking whether I ought to be afraid." "A little," Kaisa said, because she owed her the truth and could not give her the rest. "Then I will be a little afraid and I will not ask again." Astrid stepped aside. "Whatever happens on Friday, I was not told. That is true. The building will ask me, and I will have to say it in that room with that machine, and I want you to know now that I will say it, and that it will not mean what they will make it mean." It was the last ordinary conversation Kaisa had on the fourth desk, and she did not know that at the time, and she thought about it most days afterward. Except that at eleven that night a Zheldan requisition moved in Verzhan, and Orrell, who had a head in a signal hut four hundred kilometers north and very little patience, telephoned Kaisa from the call box that was not in the log and used four words. "They are coming." The mile was on the northern line where the track ran through birch scrub with a maintenance hut at the halfway point and nothing else for a kilometer in either direction. Orrell had chosen it because a man could approach it on foot along the trackbed or by the service road, and either way he would have to cross open ground in the last hundred meters, and open ground is where a watcher earns his pay. He had two frontier officers with him, one in the hut and one in the scrub, and he had a camera with a lens for low light and a notebook he intended to fill with times. The tasking had named the hour precisely. A careful reader would give the enemy the hour. A careless one would give them the day and let them choose. They came at the hour. Two of them, on foot, up the service road, in the dark, one carrying a satchel that could have held a tasking or a radio or nothing. They stopped at the hut. They waited. One of them walked a slow circuit of the ground, the way a man checks a room before a meeting, and Orrell lay in the scrub with his cheek against wet birch bark and did not breathe in a rhythm the ground could hear. They waited twenty minutes. Nobody came. The source who did not exist did not exist, and the two men in the dark had traveled four hundred kilometers to keep an appointment with a man who had never lived, and Orrell photographed them both, and took the time, and wrote nothing down until they had gone, because paper makes no sound but a moving hand makes a shape. At three in the morning Kaisa sat in Fonn's office with the first photographs, wet from the courier, and Fonn looked at the two men and then at her, and for a long moment neither of them said the thing that the photographs said. "One of them is a face we have," Fonn said at last. "The taller one. He came through a diplomatic post three years ago and left before we could do anything with him. His name in their service is on file. His name in our file is not the same name, which is normal, and his face is the same face, which is not." "And the other?" "The other I have never seen. Which means nothing and means everything." Fonn pushed the photographs across the desk. "The hour was in the document. The document went through the section chief and no one else took a copy, which Kolm's log confirms, and the enemy arrived at the hour, which your officer confirms, and there is now a line between those two facts and the line has one name on it." Kaisa looked at the two faces, ordinary men in a birch wood, and felt the thing she had been building for two months close like a hand. "There is a second line," she said. "We should look for it before we move." "What second line?" "He was too calm." She said it slowly, testing it. "When I gave him the document he read it and signed it and put it in the pouch, and he did not ask a single question about a source he had never heard of, and a section chief asks about every new source, always, because that is the job. He did not ask because he had already decided what to do with the paper before he opened the tray. That is the second line. A man who reads and acts in the same hour is a man who has read the same page many times before." Fonn was quiet. "Bring him in tomorrow morning," he said. "In the small room. Kolm will take his pass at the door and I will tell him nothing until he is sitting down, and when he is sitting down I will not be in the room." He looked at her. "You will be. You found him." The order should have pleased her. Kaisa walked home along the water with the photographs in her coat and found that it did not please her at all, because the small room had two chairs and a machine with a conscience, and one of those chairs had been hers eleven days ago, and the man who would sit in the other chair tomorrow had taught her how to sit in it. ---