The Ears of a Cat Page 3

  ‘There is very little here, Ms Horváth.’

  ‘Policy, Mr Stenvik, after one of our directors was subjected to a sustained attack on social media. Anyway, we would benefit greatly from the advice of an expert such as yourself. I mean, it’s clear from some of your published work…’

  Stenvik held up a hand: he had missed his calling as a traffic policeman.

  ‘My focus now is on the regulation of autoimmune inflammatory responses – as you would know if you had studied the chronology of my work with greater care. I’m afraid your journey here has been in vain.’ He looked at her as if appraising an object for sale or auction. ‘Anything of a general nature you wished to know could easily have been established by email exchange.’

  ‘I appreciate that, but when it comes to communication, I find face-to-face contact by far the most effective method. You can read the signals. You know where you are, so to speak.’

  ‘And here you are in Trondheim.’

  The sarcasm was unmistakable. They were only halfway through their hummuskubbe and the outlook wasn’t good for the other half. So she didn’t reveal how much she loved to travel, nor how easy it was for her to work en route from one destination to another, and definitely not the brief encounters her travelling made possible, all with no commitment.

  ‘I hope you don’t feel I’ve wasted your time, Mr Stenvik. Perhaps there is someone else you could recommend?’

  Stenvik was trying to arrive at a decision and it showed in his face; without noticing what he was doing, his fingers strayed to his beard and began to scratch.

  ‘You may feel I have held you at a distance, Ms Horváth, but there is good reason for that; there are people out there who take the view that all life is the work of the Creator and therefore also the building blocks of life. So it is not up to us to interfere with His work. There have been fires and at least one suspicious death. These people take direct action.’

  ‘That sounds a bit drastic.’

  ‘They believe disaster awaits if we continue on our present course, so their objective is to stop us in our tracks.’

  ‘And you thought I might be one of them.’

  ‘The stated aims on your website might easily be a cover for your true intentions. We have to be careful. You might be acting on theological grounds.’

  Horváth, who knew what she was really like, found this suggestion hilarious.

  ‘But, Mr Stenvik, look at me: I don’t have a theological bone in my body!’

  It appeared to her then that Stenvik accepted her invitation, attempted to verify her claim by close inspection, and came to the view that there was too much flesh on display for theology to be a serious consideration. At which point he relented a little.

  ‘I can’t afford to be forthcoming with someone I have just met, however engaging. I hope you understand.’

  Stenvik picked up his phone and scrolled through his contact list.

  ‘You mentioned someone else. In fact, there is. I shall message his details to you. But sound him out first; you will have to convince him. His name is Hugo Channing.’

  So she had visited a new destination, another marker pinned to her mental map of the world, but in other respects her trip had been a waste of time and money. Since both were in short supply, she resolved to be firmer with Catherine Cooper from here on in. But Horváth was a girl well versed in the art of giving up. As always on such occasions, she tried to turn a setback to her advantage, took a card from her bag and passed it to Stenvik. Though he’d done his homework, he read it and pretended to be surprised.

  ‘Jaha, you are a professional translator!’

  ‘So if you ever need a cutting-edge piece of research translated into Hungarian,’ she said with a winning smile, ‘I’m your girl.’

  7

  The question for Cooper was who she could safely confide in. She liked Cindy Horváth, the only woman she knew who brought her out of herself, but worried that she talked too much, especially in bed. As for Saito, all the evidence suggested she was rock solid. But she hadn’t met her yet and perhaps never would. And now here was Magnus Hjemdahl planning to drop by on his return journey from Geneva. According to him, there was much to discuss and only doing it in person would be secure. Unless her flat was bugged, he was probably correct.

  ‘So, Schnucki, are we bugged? What do you think? Can we sniff out a hidden mic? Not a lot to ask in return for board and lodgings.’

  Lang saw Hjemdahl arrive, took several shots through her windscreen on the off-chance, but then wasn’t sure which apartment he entered. He was just shy of two metres tall, with light brown hair and no beard or moustache. Not even designer stubble, she noted with approval. A neat and tidy young man. And that was who Cooper saw when she opened the door.

  ‘Magnus.’

  ‘Catherine.’

  They didn’t attempt so much as an air kiss; the fact that they shared objectives didn’t mean they had to like each other.

  ‘I think you should know I’ve given up cooking. I have meals delivered, or if it’s open at the time I eat in Café Air.’

  Walking through to Cooper’s living room, Hjemdahl was struck by her two opposing sofas, neither of which had been there on his previous visit.

  ‘Quite confrontational, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘One for me, one for Schnucki; he likes the one with the throw.’

  ‘And Schnucki will inherit the world.’

  Cooper left this comment unanswered, as she often did with Hjemdahl; no point in encouraging his tendency to noise her up.

  ‘I only have beer, I’m afraid; no whisky or gin.’

  ‘Beer is fine. We eat later, yes?’

  Cooper looked at her watch. It was getting on for three o’clock.

  ‘The café closes at six.’ Hjemdahl didn’t respond. ‘Just so you know.’

  Schnucki being nowhere to be seen, he threw his jacket on one end of the sofa with the green throw and sat at the other.

  ‘No glass, please, Catherine; straight from the bottle is best.’

  He’d adopted this policy on reading that glasses in cafés and bars were seldom as clean as they looked, and it irked Catherine to be included in such company. She resisted the temptation to hand him his bottle unopened and leave him to crack it open with his teeth.

  ‘Anyway, about our friend Eric.’

  Cooper heard him out. She thought of Eric Wanless as the Idiot Boy but agreed that given his new position, he might be more useful alive than dead.

  ‘You did the right thing.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  He started fidgeting then reached for his coat.

  ‘You’ve only just got here, Magnus.’

  ‘There’s an ice-cold draught and it’s getting to my neck. Where is it coming from?’

  The door to the balcony was open several inches, held in that position by two of Cooper’s texts on political geography.

  ‘He likes to make himself scarce when strangers are here. He’ll come back in when you leave.’

  Hjemdahl knew who came first in this household and it wasn’t him.

  ‘At which point you’ll kill the draught. Right, I get it.’

  ‘Anyway, how are things at Ringhals? We haven’t heard for a while.’

  That was because there was nothing to report; progress was painfully slow. Decommissioning reactors took many years, always more than projected, and invariably cost sums of money with so many zeros at the end that no one knew how to pronounce them.

  ‘The company claims we’ve started on Reactors 1 and 2, but really we’ve done very little. Preparing the ground, so to speak.’

  ‘And your view hasn’t changed.’

  Nuclear blasts would do the job, and certainly better than anything else. But if Cooper wasn’t willing to go with that…

  She wasn’t, and for the s
ame tired old reason. Wiping out people was one thing, devastating other species as well wasn’t an option. It defeated the purpose of the enterprise.

  ‘You’re thinking of cats.’

  ‘A cheap shot, Magnus, if I may say so.’

  ‘But you will accept that the environment would recover in due course.’

  ‘Since that might include homo sapiens, I don’t find it reassuring.’

  Hjemdahl was beginning to think that no solution, however effective, would meet with her approval.

  ‘Well, if you’re not into nuclear explosions, how about dirty bombs; have you considered my thoughts on that?’

  Dirty bombs could be detonated in highly populated areas with little damage to wildlife other than pigeons, certainly not the case with a conventional nuclear weapon. Hjemdahl had access to nuclear waste but had yet to figure out how to get it off site without being caught, let alone building dirty bombs without exposing himself to lethal amounts of radiation. Even for him, radical by nature, this was a consideration.

  ‘Well, Magnus, I have. But I’ve studied other sources as well and they’re all of the view that dirty bombs would be more effective in creating panic than in wiping people out.’

  Hjemdahl had read those sources too and found their conclusions hard to argue with.

  He sighed. ‘It won’t be easy, will it?’

  ‘No one said it would be.’

  They were both surprised when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Expecting someone?’

  ‘No.’

  Cindy Horváth on her way home from Trondheim. Fighting free of her hockey club hug, Catherine showed her into the living room.

  ‘Look who I found on the doorstep.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hjemdahl said sourly, ‘you keep open house for waifs and strays.’

  ‘Watch it, Hjemdahl, or I’ll have your guts for garters.’

  He didn’t know what garters were but knew a threat when he heard it.

  Horváth turned to Cooper in search of refreshment.

  ‘No chance of a vodka martini, I suppose?’

  Hjemdahl laughed. ‘You have to be joking. All she has is a couple of beers in the fridge.’

  ‘A couple of beers will be fine.’

  *

  Outside in the gathering cold, Lang was beginning to think she was wasting her time. The women were friends; she’d seen them together before. As for the man, he was either the boyfriend of one or the friend of both. Or maybe, she must learn to keep up with the times. Maybe this man was the boyfriend of both. It didn’t bear thinking about, but according to Bild, such things happened.

  Her phone vibrated. It was Klein.

  ‘Ursula, where are you?’

  Though he never addressed her by her first name in person, he often did by phone. What did that tell her about him? She had no idea and knew better than to wonder.

  ‘In my car by Leise Park, opposite the Cooper apartment.’

  ‘Which affords you an excellent view.’

  ‘I see everyone who enters and leaves – even the ears of a cat on the balcony.’

  She thought he might rise to that but was disappointed.

  ‘There has been a new development, a fire at Aquanova AG.’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘Neither had I,’ an admission so rare it was bankable, ‘but it was deliberate.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Aquanova specialises in nanobiology.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Further to that, they’re based in Darmstadt which, as you know, is where Cooper’s father is based, our esteemed friend Dr Weber.’

  ‘If I may say so, Herr Klein, that is a tenuous link to say the least. It’s probably just coincidence.’

  There was a brief pause before Klein resumed. He did not, as she knew, believe in coincidence. All connections, however tenuous, should be explored. It was failure to explore such connections which led to breakdowns in security, sometimes leading to loss of life.

  8

  Standing on the rooftop terrace overlooking her quarter of Los Angeles, Gina Saito gazed at the barbecues provided for the residents and despaired. Charcoal was dirtier but gas, once burned, could not be renewed. Best to avoid barbecues altogether, though not many were tempted to grill outdoors in December. Only the most die-hard, as die hard they would.

  She returned to her apartment, poured herself a glass of water from the kitchen tap and sat down at her desk. Her laptop had its uses, such as running her social media account. Creating a fictional young woman and choosing pictures to match had bored her at first, but after a time she warmed to this airhead alter ego who went to parties, drank strangely coloured cocktails in clubs and aired her views on cosmetic products which no one in her right mind would need or want. Anything to throw the enemy off the scent. More to the point, her laptop was useful for encrypting files, something she had persuaded the others to do. Except Magnus Hjemdahl, a difficult individual she suspected of a misogynistic streak, hostility to the Japanese, or a toxic combination of both.

  But despite these connected virtues, the technology which interested her more was her second-hand Hermes 3000. Despite its bilious green colour, she’d fallen in love with her typewriter. There it sat on her desk, connected to nothing. No one, however hi-tech, could hack it, not the Russians, the Chinese nor the spotty geeks of Anonymous. She was safe from everything except theft. And there the danger was not the machine itself – it could fall into enemy hands if it liked – but the ribbon, which registered every letter she typed. Did the NSA employ dedicated ribbon analysts? She doubted it, but if they were catching up on the past, they were unlikely to advertise the fact.

  She looked across the room to the tank and her neon tetras. She’d considered hiding the ribbon in a waterproof cover among the floating tendrils of the aquatic plants, but the finicky task of removing it from the machine every time she went out, and reinstalling it on her return, proved too much. And then there were the fish to consider. She talked with them every day but she knew that for them, as with all other species, too much human intervention would prove traumatic. Their glow would dim and fade. And sometimes, sadly, their little lights would flicker one last time and go out altogether. So she opted instead to train a webcam on her green machine and spy on it via her phone. It hadn’t moved a muscle, not once.

  Saito lived alone but she was never lonely, a fact lost on her colleague, Rafael Munoz. His references to horizontal dancing lost on her completely, he had tried several times to tempt her out of her solitary existence and into his bed. In fairness to Munoz, Saito’s futon would have done him just as well and at the same time satisfied his curiosity concerning her apartment. How could she afford to rent at Atrium Court? Computer support technicians weren’t so well paid. He suspected assistance from her family in Sapporo, and he was right; her father helped, but Munoz knew nothing of her other source of income, reviews of gadgets published in TechStuff and Wired under the byline Herschel J Wood. The less the world knew about her the better. Provide them with dots and given half a chance someone would join them up.

  Saito had a better handle on the group than anyone else. Even when traffic wasn’t routed through her, she encouraged good practice. Hjemdahl resented what he termed uncalled for and oppressive control, going so far as to call her the Admiral Yamamoto of the digital age. But the others cooperated well. Even Cindy, when she remembered. I really like this encrypted mail business, she admitted after trying the new email client, keeps my men in watertight compartments.

  Over the last few months, Saito had worked on the typescript of a strategy document in which she had analysed the issues, evaluated the possibilities and looked for a way forward. Now in its third draft, A Human-Free World and How to Achieve It was better structured and very much better expressed, though no nearer to a practical solution than it had been at the outset. But too much
concentration on a single subject inhibited progress, and Saito sometimes sought solace elsewhere, mostly recently in Thailand.

  It seemed to her that the natural world ravished the soul, though she resisted this thought since soul was a concept she couldn’t define. Despite this reservation, she made several recordings of ocean waves breaking on the shore, breaking and withdrawing – a beach on Koh Rok Nok where she had spent long hours alone. Whenever she played it back, it called to mind warm sand and a variety of smells: drying moss, pine trees near the beach, decaying seaweed. But above all, the sound, though sad, was soothing. Perhaps it was soothing because it was sad, since sadness was at the root of all other feelings. Clouds might vanish from the face of the sun but they always came back.

  Saito turned to the toothbrush on her desk. It was stylish all right, no doubt about that: white, sleek and easy in the hand. And guess what, it was intelligent as well, with motion and direction sensors built in and a Bluetooth chip to send its data to the user’s mobile phone where Enamel, its proprietary app, analysed the data it received and gave a readout on areas not brushed well enough or missed out altogether. It even had fun graphics for the kids. Wow, what would Herschel J Wood make of that!

  Well, Herschel was impressed; the brush did what it said on the tin and he would say as much in his review. But Saito didn’t care for it all. She imagined Cindy Horváth using it in Budapest and Magnus at Ringhals. All well and good. Then she imagined them meeting with Catherine Cooper in Berlin, all three cleaning their teeth before bedding down for the night. Which wasn’t so hard to imagine since that was where they were. And if all three used these brushes? Somewhere in their spacious new building in Berlin, employees of the Bundesnachrichtendienst would track them to the same place and time because this wonderful new device talked to their mobile phones. So really, there was only one possible conclusion; intelligent devices should be avoided altogether.

  She was rising to talk to her fish when a ping alerted her to an incoming notification. An hour after his meeting with Horváth, Arne Kristian Stenvik had been killed crossing Prinsens Gate. According to Aftenposten, traffic deaths were rare in Trondheim: no consolation to science and even less to Stenvik. Assumed to be an accident at the time, credit for his death was claimed within twenty-four hours by someone claiming to represent a religious action group. Stenvik’s research was an offence in the eyes of the Lord: let others take note.