'It is as safe as anywhere, and nowhere. We are at Level Red, which is all I can tell you. We are at maximum level of security. Be alert to danger, Mr Tarent, and if the alarm sounds you must a.s.semble with everyone else outside. There are instructions posted in every room.'

He nodded politely, then withdrew through the door and closed it behind him.

6.

Tarent returned to the other building and once again found room G27. He leaned his bag against the corridor wall, made sure his cameras were securely stowed away, then squared up to the door. He was determined that this time the woman in the room should not force the door closed against him.

There was a hand-shaped tactile pad by the side of the door, which he had not noticed before. He pushed his palm against it, feeling the familiar sensation of the reading of sensory information, and waited. A minute pa.s.sed, then another. Tarent remained braced against the door, hoping it would open, ready to block it with his weight if she tried to close it against him again.

He heard the lock turning, and the security chain rattled. This time the door opened slowly, revealing her face, much as before.

'I told you to b.u.g.g.e.r off,' she said.

'I'm appealing to you. It's not my fault they've given me the wrong room. I've nowhere to sleep. That's all I want. Please let me in?'

'Try your key card in one of the other doors. That sometimes works.'

'And go through all this with someone else who doesn't want me?'

'Several of the rooms are vacant. Since the May 10 attack this building has been half empty. They are transferring operations out of here to the DSGs. Just walk along and try some of the other doors. I don't want you in here, you don't really need to be in here, admin has f.u.c.ked up and double-booked you. You'll find another room if you look. I've got work to do.'

'I have diplomatic status.'

'Yes, and we both know that's bulls.h.i.t. I've seen what the databank holds about you. Your security clearance is OK, but you're not a diplomat.'

Still she did not push the door against him. He had his hand raised and his foot placed hard against the base of the floor, in case she did.

He said, 'If you've read the output from my tactile profile, you know I am who I say I am.'

'It makes no difference.'

He stared through the narrow gap at her. She was deliberately keeping her expression neutral, but she was no longer trying to force the door closed. For several long seconds they both held the gaze. Nothing more was said.

He drew back and Tarent thought he saw, for an instant, a small smile dash across her face. What she meant by it he did not know and did not care. He stepped back further, picked up his luggage. She was still there at the door, having moved to peer out at him through the chained gap. He ignored her and walked off down the long corridor.

Putting to the test what she had said he slipped the key card into the reader of the first door he came to. The red locked light glowed instantly, so he withdrew the card at once, not wanting a confrontation with whoever might be inside. The same thing happened at the next door, and the one after, and at all the doors along the corridor. He climbed a staircase to the second storey and at the first door he tried on that floor he was rewarded with a green glow from the LED and the clunk of a released lock.

Hardly believing his luck had changed, Tarent went swiftly inside and slammed the door behind him. The room was not only vacant, it was clean and everything had been arranged tidily. It looked at first sight as if it had barely been used. Every domestic utility was in place kitchen and cooking equipment, a working shower and toilet, a closet for his clothes, two large beds with bedding folded neatly on top of both of them. There was a desk with a tablet computer, a scanner/printer, instructions for wifi usage and satellite connections printed on a card lying beside them. There was another small room adjacent to this, with a couch and two comfortable chairs, a TV, shelves for books, and more. The rooms were moderately heated.

He left most of his luggage where he had first dumped it as he entered the room, threw off his clothes and luxuriated in a hot shower.

He went to bed.

Tarent was woken in the morning by the unnerving feeling that he was not alone. He sensed a presence in the room, a movement of the air, a subtle variation in light, the sound of quiet footsteps. He half-opened an eye, reacted to the glare of daylight from an uncurtained window. He closed the eye again.

He lay still, waking quickly but not yet turning or sitting up, knowing someone was in the room with him. It was obviously some new problem that would have to be dealt with. The many events of the day before were still fresh in him sleep had not alleviated his memories of them. He imagined an intrusion from the officials who ran this place, someone else whose room it was intended to be, instructions to vacate.

Then a female voice said, 'I can make you some coffee if you would like it.'

He turned over and levered himself with his elbows into a half-sitting position. It was the woman from Room G27. She was standing away from his bed, next to the alcove where the cooking equipment had been positioned. A cupboard door was open. Her stance was neutral, unthreatening. The offer of coffee was tentative, almost a pre-negotiation.

'How did you get in?'

'The usual way. I'll drink some coffee too, if you will have one.'

'Black, please. Without sugar.' She took down the coffee filter machine that was on a ledge. 'How did you get into my room?' Tarent said again.

'The same way you opened my door.' She raised an arm and presented the palm of a hand towards him.

'So how did you know which room I'm in?'

'You're carrying a signal emitter.'

'My camera?'

'Whatever.'

'Do you mind if I get out of bed? I need to use the bathroom.'

'Help yourself,' she said, without turning. Tarent, seeing no alternative, rolled naked out of the bed, took a moment to find his balance and catch his breath, then walked across to the bathroom. His chest was still painful. He emerged a few minutes later with a towel wrapped around him the woman was now seated in one of the chairs, but she turned away while he pulled on some clothes.

'You might want to read this,' she said. Gripping it lightly between two of her fingers, she held out a security card for him to take. With a cup of coffee scalding his fingers, Tarent walked across to the reader installed on the wall next to the door and downloaded the ID information about her. She sat silently while he read the screen, watching him, sipping her own drink. He made a hard copy of what he found.

She was called Marie-Louise Pejman, born of Anglo-Iranian parents, both now deceased. Her father had been a government scientist in Teheran, her mother a teacher at the English school in the city. Their deaths were recorded as natural causes, but both had been in their forties at the time of death. Teheran was heavily sh.e.l.led by anti-republican forces when regime change took place from the dates it seemed likely they had been caught up in that. After their deaths she was evacuated to IRGB and after leaving school she changed her name to Louise Paladin. She was known to friends and some of her colleagues as Lou. She was now 39. She lived in London with a partner, but all references to the partner were greyed out on the screen and did not print in the hard copy. This was the convention used by the databank for information thought to be inaccurate or out of date.

Her profession was described as a supply teacher, English, Art, Design and Farsi, for students of either s.e.x in the age group 1118 years. She had become a full-time teacher in recent months, and was described as having been seconded to OOR.

Tarent had read many of these print-outs in the past and like most people had learned to try to see past the bureaucratic annotations and interpretations. In Lou Paladin's case, there were not many of these, although her matter of secondment to the OOR had been annotated as 'provisional'. As well as all this, there were the usual extra factual details of no great interest to Tarent: her place of birth, education, security rating, address, and so on.

The working protocol of tactile or card ID was that users were able to access data at equivalence levels this meant that the lower of the two was usually the level at which information would be available to read or be exchanged. It followed that Lou Paladin had learned as much about him as he had learned about her, or could do if he took an interest and read through to the end.

He handed her back her ID card.

'Do you normally share this sort of thing with strangers?'

'No. But because you palmed my door, I was able to read what they have on the record about you. Isn't it fair that you should read mine?'

'I suppose. Is that normal in this place?'

'I don't think so.'

'So you are a teacher. Does that mean there are children on this base?'

'Not now. I'm waiting for a ride out of here, but my manager is not sure where I should go. London is off-limits at the moment and the DSGs are spread about, so no schools have been set up yet.'

'Why not London?'

'It depends if I want to go on working for the Office. If I do that I have to wait until a school is ready, which means staying here. If I hand in my resignation I could go back to London any time I like. But you know what happened in London.'

'Yes, but I only heard about it yesterday. I've been abroad, out of contact with what happened. Were you living in London?'

'I was in a flat in Notting Hill.'

'That was under the-?'

'The May 10 attack. Yes. I'd also have to find my own way back to London, and I'm not sure I'd know how to do that.'

'Things are that bad?' Tarent said.

'Private travel has become almost impossible because of the restrictions. There have been insurgent attacks all over the country, so it's risky to drive anywhere, even when the roads are opened. Trains were in use until recently, provided you could put up with the security measures, but the last storm did a lot of damage to bridges and embankments. I suppose you're sorry you came back from wherever it was.'

'I was in Turkey.'

'Yes, of course. I read that. You were in Anatolia. And I know your wife died. I'm sorry.'

She glanced away. The wind was high again and rain was slanting down the window gla.s.s. There was a cold draught from the window.

'Why did you come to my room?' Tarent said.

'Well, I thought I should apologize for last night. There was no way I was going to let you in, but I think I could have handled it more gently.'

'It worked out all right,' Tarent said, looking around at the satisfactory room where he had ended up. 'I think I might have done the same if it was the other way around. I'm no longer sure why I'm here. There was supposed to be some kind of debriefing interview about what happened to me in Anatolia, but that seems to have been abandoned by the people here. Like you, I'm going to have to decide what to do next.'

She leaned towards him intently.

'When you arrived back in Britain, did you travel through London?'

'Yes.'

'Did you go anywhere near May 10? In west London? Did you go through Notting Hill?'

'We pa.s.sed close to that part of London, but I saw nothing,' he said. 'I was not allowed to see. I was in a car but they dimmed the windows. There was a brief glimpse: I just saw blackened ground.'

'Before I came here,' she said, 'I lived in Notting Hill. That was more or less the epicentre of the May 10 incident. I lived there for more than ten years. Please, tell me anything you saw. I need to know!'

'Do you have friends there?'

'My whole life was there!'

She was crying. She raised an arm against her mouth and face, wiped it roughly over her eyes, turned away, looked around. She went to the kitchenette, found a roll of paper towels, wadded two of them up and held them to her face. She was sobbing, saying words in such misery that Tarent could no longer make them out.

We are both casualties, he thought, watching her, this stranger, but because she was a stranger he was thinking about himself, thinking about what she had described as a whole life. Her whole life, but his too.

What did he have left of that life? His parents now gone, no sisters or brothers. No roots, just endless travel as a child and temporary stays in towns whose names he never discovered, a series of schools where he eventually learned to read and write English. That was his liberation, an escape into the world of words. By the time he was ten he was more or less settled and the distractions of journeys were behind him. From there he finished school, pa.s.sed through university, started work, moved into freelance photography, a further escape into the world of images. That was his career, but what had his life been? What was the whole life of which he had just become aware? Everything focused on Melanie, that relationship, all the good years, a few of the bad periods, the times of mute anger and difficult silences, the contented memories that filled in. The first romantic years, then later the rows, the tears, the s.e.xy reconciliations, the brief holidays. No children, but they had tried for a while. Long worries about money: everyone knew how badly nurses were paid and his own income was intermittent and dependent on others hiring him and paying him. Then the trips abroad first his, then hers. They disrupted everything, although they provided a gloss of achievement, a sense that something was actually being done, but in reality the foreign visits made them foreigners to each other. Finally Anatolia and the disaster. Since then, a return to the world of sanity he had left and once understood, only to discover everything in that was breaking down too, the peace, the society, the weather, the economy, law and order, even the stabilizing forces of consensus government, a civilian police force, a free press. Nothing was as it had been, nothing was safe. The world was being marked illogically with small triangular areas of destruction, like patches of amnesia which could never be penetrated or cured.

What could he tell this woman about her home, her past whole life, that had existed somewhere in Notting Hill, now an illogical black scar on the face of London?

She was sitting between him and the window, her head bent forward. She was hiding her face perhaps she did not want him to see her crying. She threw aside the paper towels, which had become a sodden pulp, tore off two more. Behind her head was the square of sky revealed by the window. It was still early in the morning, yet there was hardly any light coming down from the sky. A great blackness of cloud obscured everything. The wind was rising, and every now and then the building shook as a stronger than usual gust impacted against the outer walls.

The woman moved across to him, and sat on the floor beside his legs.

'You're crying,' she said, and rested a hand on his arm.

'You are too.'

'I-'

Tarent folded himself sideways to reach towards her, letting an arm rest on her shoulders. He clamped his eyes closed, trying to hold back the tears. When he breathed in he had to sob because he could not help it, but his chest was still stiff after receiving the blast and the irregularity of trying to breathe through sobs made him cough and gasp aloud with pain. He slid further forward in the chair and down, so that he landed on the floor beside her.

She was holding his head now, gently brushing his hair. They were acting as lovers who did not know each other, who had no love, just need she pulled his face so that it rested on her breast while he tried to control his breathing, tried to remember what it was she had asked him.

When he moved suddenly her spectacles fell from her nose, knocked against his face, slid down his arm and landed on the floor. She made no move to recover them. He could see their half-moon shapes beside her legs. They were stained with tears. He remembered the hard, level look those lenses had given to her eyes as she slammed the door against him the night before, but now she was caressing his head and neck, trying to calm him with a compa.s.sionate touch. Her chest was heaving.

She said, 'I'm sorry, Tibor. I don't know what we can do.'

So he closed his eyes and waited for his breathing to subside, feeling once again that he was cracking out of the hardened carapace of his past, sliding vulnerably into an unknown future. The reality of the present moment was temporary, incomprehensible. Behind him was loss, ahead danger, and nothing that followed would be as it should be, and nothing was certain any more.

Feeling her hand on the side of his head, one of her fingers resting on his cheek, the rest of them reaching down tenderly towards his lips, he said, 'I've forgotten your name.'

'Louise. Lou Paladin.'

'Oh yes. Did I tell you mine?'

'Of course.'

The darkness outside increased. They could hear the roof above them creaking and groaning as the gale swept roughly against it. The time went by while they pressed against each other, no longer speaking, just holding and touching, waiting for something to change. Hailstones rattled against the window.

PART 4.

East Suss.e.x

1.

THE AMERICAN.

My name is Jane Flockhart and for most of my career I worked as a feature journalist for a web-based newspaper. I was one of the last people to see Professor Thijs Rietveld alive. He committed suicide during the evening of the day on which I interviewed him.