The Weight of Numbers (50 page)

Kathleen shifts her hand in his. With a fingertip she traces the scar across his thumb.

‘Hello,' he says, at last. ‘Hello. Thank you, Mrs Cogan. Thank you, Kathleen, for looking in on me.'

He turns and takes her by the hands. ‘I am quite well,' he says.

Outside, lights play over Portsmouth's last remaining marshes. Helicopters belly in the air.

Grade Seven civil servant Noah Hayden, disappointed, exhausted and soon to retire, comes to a nameless mud track between Portsmouth's few undeveloped reed-beds and climbs with trepidation from his car. Above him, police helicopters quarter and dice the landscape with their floodlights, tearing the hot night to shreds.

Today's anonymous tip-off has disturbed them, the way you might disturb a wasps' nest with a stick.

Hayden steps away from the car, testing his footing at every step. There are old moorings among the reed beds. The oldest have long since vanished from view, leaving only holes behind, where the wooden piles have rotted away. The holes have a petrolish sheen over them where nothing grows.

What fills these holes is an essence of rotted wood and the microscopic carcasses of whatever fed on it, mingled with the liquefied remains of whatever fed on the microbes – and on and on, who knows how long a food chain? Though water covers the holes for much of the day, what fills them has very little to do with water. It has the consistency of porridge. Dogs have been known to disappear into them. One or two children. So Noah Hayden treads carefully, and even though there is a line of plastic police tape to follow, it takes him a good five muddy minutes to cross the fifty feet or so to the burial site. The police team, forewarned, are waiting for him.

He is close. Saul Cogan, who was Hayden's room-mate at Cambridge, and his friend. Who stood him a steak sandwich in the Mount Soche Hotel in Blantyre, Malawi. Saul Cogan: gangmaster and entrepreneur; trafficker (this is known, but not yet proven) in men, women and children.

He is blurred. In the files, the tax records, the police tapes, the depositions of foreign governments and the internal inquiries of
international aid agencies, nothing adds up. There is no Saul Cogan, or there are too many Saul Cogans. He is nowhere and everywhere, a ghost in the globalized machine.

The helicopters have their lights trained on the work of recovery. The result is a kind of shifting, multi-angled daylight. Shadows leap about as if with a life of their own. Perspectives wheel and collapse. It is impossible to say what are two reed-stalks nearby and what are four reed-stalks far away. The policemen are dressed in identical waders and paper masks, and Hayden finds it no easier to focus on them. How many men are here? How many holes? How many jetties? How many helicopters? Is he going to faint?

The bodies so far recovered are lying in a row to one side of the burial site. In their anaerobic resting place, they have come to little harm. Through the greasy plastic, each horror is still recognisably human.

Why did they call him out here? To what end? He did not have to see this. He passed on the email, didn't he? He made no fuss when they took away his computer. He answered all their questions. He kept his temper when they insisted on interviewing his wife and even his children.

‘Who do you think sent this to you?'

Well, really, it hardly took a genius to answer that one.

‘Why?'

‘Because he can afford to.'

‘Meaning?' They were very excited.

‘Either Saul Cogan knows you will find him, or he knows that you will not find him.' Hayden could not resist a little smile as he added, ‘I suspect the latter.'

No, they did not have to make him see this. It is spite. Punishment for his smile. The Third Floor is spitting blood. All over Europe, the nets are tightening, the gates are swinging shut. The whole northern hemisphere is swaddled in meshes of infra-red and ultrasound. Still, this one man eludes them. Try as they might, they cannot pin him to their
card. Saul Cogan, pooping and farting at the new world order, refusing to fit in their file.

At what point, Noah wonders, did I start to like him again?

He heads back to his car. The reeds before him sway and hiss. They tickle his hands, the back of his head, his groin. Reeds spring up between him and the police tape he must follow, back to dry land and his car.

The tides. He imagines the waters encroaching, the little patch of dry land around him shrinking, shrinking. His footing gives way…

Perhaps he has been here before. The place reminds him of the bilharzia-ridden shallows of the Shire River. He has seen the Shire only once, as a functionary for the Department for International Development, when he toured the camps thrown up to accommodate refugees, Mozambican and Malawian, dispossessed by the 2000 floods. The river, which had marked the border between Malawi and Mozambique, was rife with rumours of Saul Cogan and his operations. Diligently, Hayden reported these back to his friends on MI5's Third Floor.

But it is impossible, at such a remove, to imagine what, if anything, they had made of them. Cogan's men stealing food aid. Cogan's men distributing food aid. Cogan, the lender of tractors and ploughs, collector of tithes and tribute.

Saul Cogan,
régulo
.

Yes, this might be any break along the Shire, where starving skeletons of men cook bushmeat on little fires, wary, as easily put to flight as the animals they hunt.

Might two such different places not be one place, after all? Hayling Island, the Shire River, Mozambique, Malawi, Britain – there is no difference. All places are the same place. How close are the walls of the world? Unnerved, he turns around and returns to the place where Saul Cogan has buried his dead.

Up comes another. A helicopter hovers directly overhead, winch spinning, lifting the corpse free of the mudlark's hole. Noah Hayden,
craving company, re-enters the circle of men surrounding the hole. The light and sound of the recovery operation are at their fiercest here. Everything shakes in the downwash, vivid in magnesium light.

Up it comes, through the pink-blue skein, through the interface between worlds: the corpse in its plastic wrapper.

Over fifty dead have already been recovered. Men, women, children. Where are they from? What happened, that there are so many?

The black, poisoned water settles. A metallic film forms over the hole. Pastel colours shoot and swirl across the black water, until the black is hidden.

Hayden knows these colours. They belong on maps of the world. Throw a stone into the water, he thinks, and all these pretty colours will disappear.

This is one for his friend.

Throw a stone.

Christmas Eve, 1968

Each time their link with Mission Control hissed out, without drama or fanfare, Apollo Eight command module pilot Jim Lovell was reminded of a journey he and his wife once made, driving their car through lonely Florida countryside to Lake Kissimmee: how the radio stations faded out, one by one.

Apollo Eight has not landed on the moon. It has flown by, tantalizingly close, less than seventy miles above the surface: a reconnaissance mission. Altogether, Borman Anders and Lovell have made ten lunar orbits. Each took two hours, and every other hour – when the moon got in the way of their radio communication with Earth – they spent the time in silence, taking it in turns to look out of the window at the Moon's dark side: a secret face no one had ever seen before.

The first thing Jim Lovell noticed about the Moon, seen this close up, was its lack of colour – though why this should have startled him, this self-evident fact, he cannot say.

Ten orbits; twenty hours. All the while they looked at the Moon, their eyes were tuned to the colours of home. Looking on this other world, they saw nothing but shades of grey. For Jim, it was as if the place was holding something back. As though a vital datum were being withheld.

Apollo Eight's purpose is to prove that the dream can be realized: that men can travel this far away from Earth and come home safe again. When they emerged from behind the Moon for the tenth and final time, Mission Control welcomed the crew back on air with more fanfare, relieved for them and proud of themselves. Now, hours later, the Apollo Eight spacecraft is starting its journey home, and it is time for the astronauts to speak to the waiting world.

Jim says to the world, ‘The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring.' He tries not to wince.

‘It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,' he says, wishing he did not have to listen to the words coming out of his mouth.

Lovell's words are weak. His carefully chosen, utterly inadequate words. They lack fuel. They lack thrust. He launches them and watches, helpless, as they struggle and stall and plummet back to the cold, unmeaning ground.

He has been up here often enough – with Aldrin on Gemini Twelve; before that on Gemini Seven, with Frank Borman – to know that he will never find the words. The words do not exist. All he can do, over the course of his career as an astronaut, is to encourage as many people out here as he can. Floating together, they might think up some new words, unearthly words – divine words, even – to do the job he cannot do like this, the TV camera in his face (another Apollo Eight first) and too little time.

‘For all the people on Earth,' Bill Anders says, ‘the crew of Apollo Eight has a message we would like to send you.'

Frank Borman sticks the camera in Bill's face.

‘In the beginning,' says Bill, ‘God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.'

Jim wonders: How did God divide the light? Did he divide it, like Newton, with a prism? There are no colours here. Jim has looked at the far side of the moon, and he cannot imagine that moonlight contains any colour. Pass it through a prism, every band will shine bright white.

Now the camera is in Jim's face. It is his turn. They have practised this. ‘And God called the light Day,' says Jim, ‘and the darkness he called Night.'

He takes the camera and points it towards Frank Borman. After the broom-cupboard that was Gemini, the Apollo command module feels as spacious as an ordinary room – until you start throwing TV cameras around.

Frank Borman: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.'

And were the waters blue? Jim wonders. Was the land grey, or brown, or sandy yellow? Or green with verdigris, or rusty red from all the iron in the earth? He thinks, there is iron in the Moon, but it cannot rust.

It comes to him that nothing is being withheld them here: it is simply that they have come out here with the wrong sort of eyes – eyes that see the colours of earth. They are blind to the colours of space, whatever they may be.

‘And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.'

Jim is thinking back to their last lunar orbit: the way the Earth rose over the Moon as they swung clear of the far side.

Earthrise. Above the grey of the lunar surface, the Earth was a colour. The Earth was many colours. Red and yellow in the blue. The different blues of ice and ocean. Green in there somewhere, too. Colour belonged nowhere else but on that ball.

Jim shifts the camera away – it's in the script, they've practised this – up to the window and in, filling the homes of Earth with the first ever television image of their planet. As he does so, a simple thought strikes him: it is only on the Earth that colour makes any sense. Away from Earth, colour means nothing: neither ripeness, nor rot; neither springtime, nor fall. Of course there is no colour out here. There is no one out here to benefit by it.

He thinks: We have no need of colour now. We must let it go. This kaleidoscope, this bauble of our childhood. We must lay it down, Jim thinks, and look about us at the world as it really is. We must press on
into the greater world, the real and terrible world we have found beyond our little corner: the world of black and white.

And he finds himself transported back, imprisoned in that jet again, the Banshee, a lonely dot over the Pacific, and his instruments are out and his lights are out and there are no stars and there is no
Shangri-La
and he knows his fuel is low and it is so dark the sea might as well be above him for all he knows. The sea might be above them, beside them and below them all at once, behind them and in front of them.

Rising in a calm black ocean, this bright little bubble of ape hope.

‘And from the crew of Apollo Eight,' says Frank Borman, wrapping up transmission, ‘we close with goodnight, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.'

For their hospitality and good advice I owe many thanks to Patricia and Chris O'Dell, the Barclay family, Susie Tiso, Rhidian Davis, Geoff Ryman and Nancy Hynes.

Without my agent Peter Tallack and my editor Louisa Joyner, this book would be much the poorer.