'I was away,' Tarent said.

'Yes, you were in Turkey in fact, there's no law against them there, as it happens. But you can't use them anywhere else in Europe.'

'Why should they be banned? They're just cameras.'

'Quantum technology has been declared toxic. There are known to be occasional health risks for the user, and for anyone else in range. Too many side-effects.'

'I can't believe I'm hearing this. How can a camera have side-effects? And what kind of illness am I supposed to have suffered? I've been using these cameras for more than a year.'

'I don't remember all the technical arguments. There was an advisory committee, and when the results of the tests were confirmed the Kalifate pa.s.sed an emergency Act. There is a risk in using them, intermittent but apparently serious.'

'What harm can they do? They've had no adverse effect on me.'

'How do you know? Anyway, you should hand them in.'

'These are how I make my living. There must be a way round this law for professional photographers.'

Flo touched the implant on her neck. 'Want me to find out for sure? I can do it now.'

'No, because then you'll pull rank on me and I'll have to give them up. Let me get this debriefing out of the way, then when I'm back in London I'll talk to the people I work with. If necessary I'll change the cameras then.'

'They'll tell you the same as me.'

'Maybe so. Come on, Flo you're not in the office now.'

Flo reached out to take the camera from him again, but he swung away from her and placed it back in its case. He plugged it into the recharger. He put all three of the cameras into the tiny closet. She watched him, and as he closed the closet door he looked enquiringly at her, wondering if she was going to keep arguing with him. Instead, her mood had changed abruptly again. She was sitting across from him on the bed, leaning back in a relaxed way on her elbows.

'So, we agreed we'd like another f.u.c.k?' she said.

Her mood change made him incredulous. 'I thought after that you might be about to put on your clothes and leave me.'

'No you're right. I'm not at work now. Ignore what I said about the d.a.m.ned cameras. I forget myself, sometimes. I don't know when to switch off. I'm really sorry.'

'I've been a freelance for long enough to know that the last thing to do is flout the law. If there's a problem I'll deal with it later.'

'I know, I know, let's forget it.'

'Forget everything?'

'No, I've switched off now. Let's just do what we came in here to do.'

10.

She pressed him down on the bed. He was uneasy at first, chilled by her mood swings, but they did it all again and this time their lovemaking took longer and was sweatier than before. The heating vent blew unwanted warmth on them as they slowly, pleasurably regained their breath. The physical act purged him of the irritation she had brought on, but now he was wary of her. He lay above her, his chest pressing down on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, one leg trailing away towards the floor to try to find cool air, but he was exhausted, drained, sweltering, fulfilled, exhilarated by her. Flo seemed to be asleep she was unmoving with her face buried against his shoulder, her breathing slow and steady, but after a few minutes she suddenly tensed up and tried to roll out from under him. He shifted to make a s.p.a.ce for her, so she levered herself up and away from him. She left the bed, took a brief shower in the cubicle behind him, then dried with his towel and began putting on her clothes. Tarent watched her dressing, already feeling regrets that it was over, wishing she would spend the remainder of the night with him. The thin shaft of light was still the only source of illumination in the room. He watched as she pulled on her pants over her neat, exercise-toned b.u.t.tocks, then lifted the ankle-length skirt, and retained it at her waist with a clip.

'Shall we meet again tomorrow?' he said.

'Not possible. Unless you want to give Warne's Farm a miss and travel with me to Hull.'

'I'm under orders. You know that. Why on earth do you need to go to Hull?'

Now that she had most of her clothes back on, she was a.s.sertive again. 'It's a DSG, devolved seat of government. I have meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I've several regional committees to get through, two advisory panels, a meeting with chief constables, applications from the town council, and the rest. Staffing and provisioning arrangements. Mostly routine, but time-consuming. I warned you I don't have a private life. But I can hide you in my hotel room, and see you after work, at night.'

'I'm not sure-'

'I'm having to deal with a never-ending series of problems.'

'Not on your own.'

'No the whole department is involved, of course. But there's a state of emergency, because of what happened in London. Everything is a crisis at the moment.'

'What happened in London?'

'You must have heard.'

'I've been cut off from the news for several months.'

'There was a terrorist attack on London. Just over four months ago. It was as devastating as a small nuclear weapon. It was contained in some way that we're still trying to understand. But an area of west London was completely destroyed.'

He stared at her, trying to form a reaction.

'You really hadn't heard about this, had you?' she said.

'That's incredible. There must have been thousands of casualties. It's incredible!' He realized that in the shock of hearing what she had told him he was repeating himself. He suddenly remembered the scenes he had glimpsed from the car window as the officials drove him into London: the blackened, flattened landscape they did not want him to see, the way they had darkened the gla.s.s to restrict his view. 'This really happened?' he said, insensibly. 'A nuclear attack, against London?'

'It's known as May 10, the date it happened. Not a nuke, in the way it's usually meant. It was probably a larger version of the thing they turned on your wife. Unfortunately, that kind of device is in use more and more. What happened to her was one of several similar attacks in the last month. But London was the biggest and worst incident yet. We've been able to study it, which isn't true of most of them, because of where they are used. But, well, west London makes a forensic examination much more straightforward.'

'You say there have been a lot of these?'

'At least fifteen in the last four weeks. Most of them in places like Anatolia, but there have been two similar small incidents in Britain. Three in the USA, one in Sweden. Like most people, you probably don't realize that we are at war, and this is one we're not going to win. We've already lost the war against climate change now there's this. It's the old cliche the war to end wars. This time it's literally true. If another major city is. .h.i.t, there won't be another war after this.'

'Tell me what happened in London.'

'On May 10, in the middle of the day, there was an unexplained event just to the south-west of Maida Vale. Mostly in Bayswater. Not an explosion, but it had the same sort of impact. For now it is being treated as a conventional weapon, because radiation readings are so low as to be unexceptional. And the damage was not the type of thing you expect after a nuke. But even so the damage was too great to have been caused by a conventional weapon. There's still a mystery about what exactly it was.'

'What were the casualties?' he said, aghast at this appalling news.

'Over a hundred thousand, at a minimum. The final figure could be as high as twice that, maybe more. It's a version of the Hiroshima Effect: not only were people killed, but many of the records of their lives were also destroyed, and almost everyone who knew them was killed too. Everything was annihilated that's the word the press has been using. Annihilated. There were no human remains, so it's a question of tracing relatives, or people who had friends or acquaintances at ground zero. The latest count was just over a hundred and twenty thousand people. They are described as missing, but not yet posted as dead. We suspect those figures will turn out to be the tip of the iceberg.'

'I don't understand how we never got to hear about this.' From this perspective it was frankly unbelievable, but for many weeks at the field hospital their only contact with the outside world was the occasional airlift of supplies, brought in by MSF helicopters. Because of the dangers of ground fire, the choppers only came in at night and never landed. The drugs, medical supplies, food and water were either dropped or lowered, before the helicopters soared away again.

And of course his mind was racing, trying to remember anyone he knew who might have been living in west London at that time.

'I was in London two days ago.' He told her what he had seen from the car, and she confirmed that the damaged zone was probably part of the affected area: Bayswater Road, a large part of Notting Hill, an area as far north as West Kilburn, almost as far as Maida Vale in the east. 'I was taken to an apartment after that, somewhere near Islington. The only damage I saw there was caused by the storm.'

'The explosion was contained. The charge was shaped in some way that none of the blast specialists can understand, let alone explain.'

'What do you mean by contained?'

'The blast area was restricted to defined limits. An exact triangle.' She was looking steadily at him, to see his reaction. 'It's a regular triangle, straight-edged, not aligned to north and south.'

Tarent closed his eyes, remembering the day in Anatolia.

'That's what happened to your wife, isn't it?'

Tarent said, 'Why a triangle?'

'We don't know.'

'Is it exact?'

'Was the crater you saw exact?'

'And what is inside the triangle?'

'Nothing. Everything has been destroyed. Annihilated.'

'Who the h.e.l.l could have done that?' Tarent said.

'We don't know that, either.'

'You said they had been caught.'

'We never found out who they were working for, but there is some new intelligence material we're working on. Our main concern at present is to maintain a defensive posture. We can't let it happen again. All the security measures have been in place for about a month, at the highest level of preparedness west London is more or less locked down. But what we are having to do now is to set up precautionary arrangements in case there's another attack. That's the answer to what I'm going to be doing in Hull.'

Flo had stopped dressing herself. She sat on the side of the bed next to Tarent, resting a hand on his knee.

She said, 'Shall I stay with you for a while?'

'Please.'

He moved to the cubicle and used the toilet. Then he showered. When he went back into the room Flo had finished dressing. She sat on the side of the bed, her thick outer jacket resting on her lap. He sat down next to her. He was still stunned by the news. He realized the shock that must have run through the country, indeed throughout the world, and that what he was experiencing now was probably a lesser version. At the time it happened there would have been not just the shock, but extreme concern for anyone who was affected, fear that it might happen again, anger, resentment, worry At least he had learned about it so long after the event that he knew there had not been a second outrage, or not yet. Or not one as big.

He remembered the unexplained glimpse he had had, as the car slowed down and the men he was with spoke to one another with concern about the coming storm. Because he had not known what he was looking at, all he had gained in those two or three seconds was an impression: blackness, no visible wreckage, a violent levelling.

Whenever there is a major terrorist attack, most people not directly involved take the news quietly: they learn about it through endless TV coverage, or through the internet, they keep their thoughts to themselves but inside they feel an imagined sharing of the experience: the confusion in the streets, the fright about what might be next, guilty relief that they themselves were not directly affected, wondering endlessly what had really happened. They listen to the accounts of witnesses, survivors, then come the experts, the politicians, the spokespeople, the protesters against government policy. Everything at the time of the attack would have been explained, described, yet would somehow still remain inexplicable. Four months after it happened it was already different: the event itself was clear, known, to some extent understood, but new mystery surrounded it. Even within four months, something as immensely shocking as this moves back into shared experience, history.

Eventually Flo stood up, and said, 'It's time.' He knew it was impossible for her to stay with him, but also he did not want to be alone. It was now long after midnight. She added, 'Have you decided what to do tomorrow? Are you coming to Hull with me? I need to know.'

'I'll go to my debriefing,' Tarent said. The idea of being a sort of s.e.xual plaything for her, hanging around in a hotel bedroom in Hull while she consorted with executives, soldiers and princes, did not appeal. 'I want to get home as soon as I can. Anyway, you have a country to run.'

She did not react to that.

'There's a regular helicopter supply service between Warne's Farm and the DSG compound in Hull,' she said. 'If your debriefing follows the usual format the one the OOR uses for diplomats returning from overseas postings it shouldn't last more than a day or two. I have to be in Hull for at least four days. Want to give it a try? I want you there, you know.'

'OK,' he said, but his mind was already full of too many things. The liaison with Flo had not changed anything of his life, except briefly and temporarily. Suddenly it was over. He did not want her to leave.

Now something extra had been added to his grief about Melanie: the guilt that he had fallen into bed with this woman. It was the first time he had been unfaithful to his wife, or so it unmistakably felt. Even so, he felt an urge to cling to Flo. There was no one else, and she wanted him. She said. His life ahead would be vacant, purposeless without her. He felt an overwhelming but irrational urge to keep her with him, or at least to postpone the moment when she walked out of the door. He had not known this feeling for years. A teenage crush, infatuation for a pretty girl in the town who had said she liked him. 'So will I see you in the Mebsher tomorrow?'

'You'll see me.'

'I want to be with you, Flo,' he said. 'Please stay.'

'Goodnight, Tibor.' She leaned towards him, offered herself for a chaste kiss.

There was something else, something unfinished. As their brief kiss ended, and she began to turn away from him, he said, 'Who was that man you asked me about? You said he was a Dutch scientist.'

'His name was Thijs Rietveld, but he was not a scientist. Not in the sense you probably mean. He was an academic, a theoretical physicist.'

'And you say I met him?'

'That's what it says in your file.'

'Must be a mistake. The name means nothing to me.'

'That's not what the file says. It was some time ago. But if you've forgotten-'

'I just would never come across someone like that.'

'All right.' She was by the door, working the release. The LED on the lock turned green. 'I can't make you come to the DSG meeting with me, but when you're finished at Warne's Farm, come and see me. You were present when your wife was killed, you met Rietveld. To me that's a link in a chain I'm trying to connect. Rietveld discovered adjacency. Does that mean anything to you?'

'No.'

'That's what we're working on. And a bright light in the sky. What about that? Did you see that?'

'Someone at the hospital said he saw one, just before the explosion.'

'It's another link, Tibor. We know about the bright lights, overhead at the point of the explosion, but we don't know what they are. They're not UFOs. They're something to do with adjacency.'

'I wasn't the one who saw it.'

'You were there. That's enough.' She pulled the door open. 'Anyway, I want to see you again. You know where to find me.'

'But how do I contact you if things go wrong?' The door had closed. 'You never even told me your surname,' he said, into the silence.

A shadow moved across the rumpled surface of the bed, a waving branch, leaves bending to the wind, caught in the thin shaft of light that angled in. She had left her fragrance behind, in the stuffy air of the room, on the bed sheet, in his thoughts. He should have known that her exit from his concerns would be as sudden as her entry into them: on her terms, for her needs. Shared, though. There she was, there she no longer was. He could still hear her footsteps outside, receding from him down the corridor. He was physically exhausted: the lurching travel, the talking, the s.e.x, but he was alert and awake, unready for sleep. He went across to the window and cranked up the blind to let in more of the artificial light from outside. He pulled at the window catch and to his surprise, after being eased against the paint that had sealed it, the handle suddenly moved in his hand and the window could be opened. A delicious, icy draught curled in through the narrow aperture. Outside, a wind had sprung up, bl.u.s.tering coldly between the low buildings. It blew through the canopy of the trees, making the sound of leaves that Tarent had thought he might never hear again in his lifetime. He unexpectedly remembered moments of his childhood, of playing in woods where bluebells grew and where his mother waited, of another teen romance which had involved lengthy and earnest walks in the countryside, of a long holiday in the forests of northern Germany, all conducted to the background hiss and rustle of green broad leaves and a giving wind. He pressed his face to the cold gla.s.s, staring out beyond the floodlights at the high foliage of the trees, unlit from below but moving darkly against the sky. He felt the welcome chill of the draught on his neck and shoulders, thinking of cold days, dark nights, life's past prospects. He tried to remember other things as they once had been, not so long ago and within his lifetime, but now that Flo had left him alone in his room all he could think of were the hot and deadly days in Anatolia, the despairing, endless heat, the treeless hills and the arid land, the noise of children crying, the intermittent boom of land-mines and the racket of arrogant gunfire, the broken, mutilated limbs, the sounds and smells of human death.

PART 2.

La rue des betes