Scale, p.6
Scale, page 6
He wound up the spring, then plugged the radio into the wall socket and switched it on. The speaker crackled and beeped, but the drum remained stationary for what felt like an inordinately long time. Finally, though, the SYNCHED light came on, and the drum began to turn.
Sam paid full attention now, transcribing the sequence of low and high tones emerging from the device. The receiver was capable of gathering signals from a multitude of different radio frequencies at once, but only the pattern of holes on the letter made it possible to pick out the genuine message from a forest of random camouflaging bleeps. And even if several other people happened to be using the very same technique at the same time, the particular choice of channels carrying information at any moment would only rarely overlap with the other correspondents’ transmissions, so the bulk of the message would come through intact.
When the sequence started repeating, he checked his scrawls to be sure he hadn’t made any mistakes. He still had no idea what the transmission meant; he’d never bothered committing the telegraph code to memory.
At the office, he found the code listed in an appendix to one of his procedure textbooks. He went through his transcript, converting the high/low sequence into letters, then he began the tedious process of punching out a reply to attach to the second drum. If they’d been speaking on the phone, he probably would have argued back, or at least demanded more evidence. But the medium didn’t really encourage debate, and he’d just have to trust Loretta not to be wasting his time.
He finished making the holes, proof-read the code, then proceeded to send it.
Will check out and report back.
Chapter 11
When Sam arrived at the harbor he started his enquiries at the Scale Four docks. The Harbor Authority records had shown no other Scale One boats present at the time Cara vanished, and the staff he’d spoken with had insisted that any smaller-scale vessel straying from its proper place to approach the Idyll would have attracted their attention at once. But Loretta’s theory still sounded wild to him; it seemed more likely that something more mundane, like a rowboat, had managed to reach the yacht unseen.
The docks were brightly lit by electric lamps, but the streaks of brightness reflecting off the surface of the water only left Sam more on edge. He’d acquired an inflatable lifejacket, which made him feel marginally safer, and though he’d been worried about appearing timid, most of the sailors and dockworkers wore their own without a trace of self-consciousness. But Jessica hadn’t worn one while the Idyll had been docked, so Cara probably hadn’t made a habit of it either. Not even the strongest Scale One swimmer could have stayed afloat in the river if they’d fallen in with no aids; the water that was dense enough to buoy them up was always covered by at least a meter of Scale Zero, too light to offer any support, but more than capable of suffocating them.
Sam went from berth to berth, waiting patiently for a moment when people were willing to pause in their activities and speak with him. Everyone here had heard about Cara’s disappearance, whether or not they’d been present at the time, so Sam had to steer them gently away from speculation and unattributed rumors toward their own observations, or those of someone they could send him to for verification.
Under that level of rigor, he did at least find two people who had noticed Cara on the yacht after Landau had departed, clearly alive, and apparently alone and untroubled. No one had heard a low-pitched cry for help afterward, or the splash of a body almost the size of one of their own boats striking the water.
Sam moved on to the Scale Three docks. There were only four boats moored, but even that number surprised him, given the ease of trade across the land border.
At the first boat he approached, workers were busy loading crates that were stacked into piles twice as tall as he was. But eventually, a woman noticed him and paused to ask what he wanted.
“I’m investigating Cara Leon’s disappearance, from the Scale One docks. Did you see anything happening on the Idyll, fourteen days ago, around 15:20?”
The woman gestured to him to repeat himself more slowly; Sam had brought his rescaler, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that yet. He enunciated the words as carefully as he could, thinking back to Guido’s first days at their school, and the tricks he’d learned to make himself more comprehensible to the newcomer.
“I wasn’t here, sorry,” she replied. “And this boat would have been in D3 then. Try the Cormorant.” She pointed at the vessel two berths down.
“Thank you.”
Sam weaved his way around all the intervening obstacles and approached the boat. It looked as if they were about to unmoor; he called out pleadingly, “Do you have a moment?”
One of the sailors, unknotting a rope from a post, stopped and glanced toward him. “What’s the problem?”
Sam explained his purpose. The man looked annoyed, though perhaps he was just thinking over the request. “Maybe you should talk to Jerome.” He glanced at his watch, then turned and bellowed, “Jerome!” followed by something in dialect that Sam couldn’t follow.
When Jerome emerged, his crewmate’s words seemed to have conveyed the nature of Sam’s business, but he didn’t seem entirely happy about the summons. “All I saw was a rope,” Jerome told Sam. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
The first sailor berated him in dialect; Sam gained the impression that Jerome might have previously insisted that it did, in fact, mean something, but was reticent now about taking the same line with a stranger.
“Tell me about the rope,” Sam begged him, afraid that if the exchange stretched on too long someone would put an end to it so the Cormorant could depart.
“It was just a rope hanging over the side of the Idyll, into the water,” Jerome explained. “I thought Cara might be fishing, but it was only there for ... maybe a minute.”
“When was this?”
“15:30 or so.”
That was after Landau had departed.
“Did you see Cara raising or lowering the rope?”
“No,” Jerome replied. “I was loading cargo, I wasn’t watching the boat like I had nothing better to do. I just noticed it was there, when it hadn’t been. Then I noticed it was gone a minute later.”
“Did you see anything else around the Idyll? Like a rowboat nearby?”
Jerome said, “No. If I’d seen anything suspicious like that, I would have gone to the police.”
“How thick was the rope?” Sam wondered.
“Not very. Hard to say exactly from this distance, but like I said, I thought she might have lowered a trap or a pot.”
“Would it have supported a person’s weight?”
Jerome looked uneasy. “Depends what it was made of.”
“Of course.” Sam didn’t want to start fueling new rumors among the sailors, let alone succumb too readily himself to some tenuous chain of suppositions. But if he put off asking the question that he really wanted answered, he’d only kick himself later for wasting the opportunity.
“Do you think any vessel could have come into the harbor unseen, at that time?”
Jerome appeared to be struggling to decide if Sam was mocking him. As far as anyone knew, even the mightiest navies in the world had only built a few dozen submarines between them, none of them capable of diving any deeper than the Scale Two layer. And they would all be out plying the oceans for reasons of great strategic importance, not dropping into the Mauburg River to spirit away an electronics importer.
“The Nimbus got its hull scraped by something,” Jerome offered, daring Sam to laugh at the idea of a connection. “Not then; a few days before.”
“Where?”
“As they were approaching the harbor.”
“Could it have been a rock?”
Jerome looked at him as if he were an idiot. “It was a clear channel through deep water.”
“A whale, then?” Sam ventured, wishing he’d read more nautical adventure stories. Was there any species of a suitable size and toughness frequenting the river that would save the idea from being ludicrous?
“Perhaps,” Jerome conceded.
“Where’s the Nimbus’s home port?”
“D2.”
Sam glanced toward the Scale Two section of the docks. “They’re not here now,” Jerome said. “I don’t know when they’ll be back.”
The sailor who’d summoned Jerome was starting to look impatient. Sam said, “Thank you for your help.”
“It’s nothing.” Jerome jumped back onto the Cormorant, and the first sailor proceeded to unmoor the boat.
Chapter 12
McKenna listened in silence, then asked Sam, “And where do you think they took her, in this submarine? Atlantis? Or did it turn into a spaceship and fly her to the moon?”
Sam ignored his sarcasm. “I don’t know where they’re holding her. But can’t you raise this with the appropriate authorities, and try to find out if any vessel like this is known to them?”
“Known to them how? From a story they overheard in a tavern?”
“There must be sonar stations that are meant to detect any incursions by foreign fleets,” Sam argued. “If they picked up a trace of this themselves, then lost it, they might welcome any news about a separate sighting.”
“Except you have no sighting,” McKenna replied. “You have someone who saw a rope for a few seconds, and someone else with a scratch on their hull.” Another detective knocked on the door of the office, then entered and left a report on McKenna’s desk. He picked it up and glanced at it, frowning.
“And the footprints on the Idyll,” Sam added.
“If you want to tell the navy you think there’s an enemy submarine in the river, go ahead.”
“Not an enemy in the usual military sense,” Sam stressed. “More a civilian enterprise that’s ... gone a little off the rails.” Loretta had asked him not to talk about G8’s super-steel, so it was hard to explain why civilians really might be capable of such an audacious feat.
McKenna said, “Tell them whatever you want to tell them. Why do you need me to hold your hand?”
“I already phoned their public affairs office in Wendale,” Sam admitted. “They brushed me off.”
McKenna smiled. “All right, then. So either they already knew about this submarine and they’re on top of the whole situation, or they’re sure you’re just wasting their time. Either way, there’s nothing I can do.”
Sam said, “Thanks, it’s always a pleasure.”
Out on the street, it felt even chillier than it had been by the river. He turned up the collar of his coat and walked briskly until he was warm again. If the navy and the police weren’t interested, he’d just have to do their job himself – or at least, find out if it was possible, and if Jessica was willing to pay for it.
There was no one offering the kind of service he needed in the D4 phonebook, so he went to the library and tried D5. Marine surveying seemed to be the closest category, and there was only one number. He thought of calling it from his office, but then he wondered if Loretta’s elaborate precautions really had been warranted, so he used a public booth.
“Benthic Mapping, how can we help you?”
Sam sketched his requirements and obtained a quote. Then he called Jessica from a different booth, and spoke vaguely about the need to bring in some specialist help.
“All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Sam doubted she’d been getting much sleep throughout the night, and he was almost glad he’d had a reason not to spell out his plans. If someone had called him at the same phase of his own body clock and asked if they could hire a sonar operator to hunt for the submarine whose crew had snatched his missing relative from a boat, he would probably have thought he was still asleep, transposing all his anxieties into a surreal nightmare. Either that, or he’d assume that the search was actually aimed at something grimmer.
When he hung up the call he closed his eyes and saw Cara floating in the dark water, trapped between the layers, staring up at the stars. Maybe the truth was as sad, and as simple, as that.
But it would still be better to know.
Chapter 13
Jake slid the camera out from beneath the sleeve of his jacket and took three shots in quick succession, aiming discreetly at the man stooping to place a package by the foot of the park bench. The bench was close to a lamppost, and Jake was using the fastest film stock he had, so he was confident that Bremmer would be recognizable in the photographs. Even a hat casting a shadow across his face might have rendered the images ambiguous, but apparently he was more intent on looking as if he had nothing to hide than on taking a few simple precautions.
Jake kept walking along the path, passing Bremmer without looking back, trusting his instinct that no one would try to make the pickup in the next second or two, and that the worst thing he could do would be to loiter at the site. The whole thing would have been simpler with two operatives, but there was no point dwelling on that. He reached the drinking fountain, quenched his thirst with authentic relish, then turned around and strolled back the way he’d come.
As he approached the bench again, he noticed a man in a blue jacket who’d been walking a little behind him as he’d arrived at the fountain, but was now a few paces ahead. That could be a coincidence; the park was full of people cutting across briskly on their way to work, or following various circuits for exercise, but there were also plenty who were just rambling around to pass the time and get some air.
The parcel was still where Bremmer had left it, but the man in the blue jacket strode right past the bench. Jake didn’t know if Blue Jacket had spotted him observing the drop, but if he’d wanted to collect the parcel, surely he could have taken it while Jake was at the fountain.
When the path came to an intersection, Blue Jacket kept walking straight ahead. Jake turned right; the route he was on now would circle back to the fountain, but he’d have a clear view of the bench all the way.
A woman pushing a stroller sat down on the bench, and took some things out of a bag. Jake was too far away to see exactly what the items were, but one of them appeared similar to the parcel itself. All she had to do was drop it and pick up Bremmer’s instead. It was lucky he hadn’t missed her, or he could have spent the next two minutes surveilling a box of diapers.
She wasn’t looking his way, so he risked taking a few shots. It would have been better to be closer – the fast film made for grainy blow-ups – but he wasn’t sure he’d get the chance.
As he continued along the path, the woman started moving the stroller back and forth as if to soothe the occupant; when she stopped, it was blocking Jake’s view of the parcel. He increased his pace, hoping to shift his perspective enough to see past the obstacle, but then the woman leaned down to attend to the child. Jake took another few shots, then watched her repack her bag and walk away. Something lay on the ground where the parcel had been, but he had no idea if it was the original.
The woman was heading toward the fountain; Jake continued along his own path, then turned at the fountain before she arrived, approaching her almost head on. He put his left hand to his right wrist and finally captured an image of her at close range, then he continued on toward the bench.
As he drew nearer, he saw that the parcel was gone. If she really had swapped it, who would have had reason to take whatever she’d substituted? So she’d either been a decoy, or just a passerby with no connection to the whole business.
Jake kept walking, cursing under his breath. He scanned the throng in front of him, hoping he might spot the parcel still in someone’s hands, but there was no sign of it.
Ahead of him, something else caught his eye. There was a man in a gray jacket, but his height and build, and the color of his hair, seemed like an exact match for Blue Jacket. Perhaps the perceived resemblance was wishful thinking ... but he had nothing to lose now. Chasing after the woman with the stroller in the hope that that might tell him something useful would be even more absurd.
Jake followed Gray Jacket out of the park, onto Swanson Street. Then he began to walk a little faster, to give himself a chance to pass his target. Even a sideways glimpse ought to be enough to determine whether he was wasting his time.
When he came abreast of Gray Jacket, the features that crossed his peripheral vision confirmed the match. This man had crisscrossed the park just as Bremmer was leaving his parcel of cash, and he’d made an effort to change his appearance. Whether he’d noticed Jake watching Bremmer or not, someone had snatched the parcel, and this man had either done it himself or acted as a lookout.
Jake slowed his pace, but Gray Jacket did not appear in front of him. Jake turned right into a side street, then he stopped and gazed into the shopfront of a clothing store, close to the corner, angling his view just enough to be able to see if Gray Jacket continued down Swanson Street.
A few terts later, he appeared, ambling along. Jake waited long enough for a dozen other pedestrians to pass the corner, then he re-entered Swanson Street. Gray Jacket was visible ahead; he had taken no sudden detours or evasive maneuvers, but he was walking much faster now.
Jake followed him, keeping up but maintaining his separation. At Kelly Street, Gray Jacket turned right; at Davenport Street he turned right again, back toward the park.
At the corner with Arzner Lane – the other end of which Jake had entered earlier, to stare into the shop window – Gray Jacket paused and looked to his right for an inordinately long time, as if he was checking to see if Jake was still somewhere in the lane. But why had he doubled back at all? If he’d spotted Jake as a potential tail, this seemed like an odd strategy to try to shake him.
Gray Jacket reached a decision, and turned into Arzner Lane. Jake was bemused now. What was the point of leading him around in circles? To let Jake know that he’d been caught out, and that the pursuit would now be a waste of time for both of them?
