Caleb sat in the darkness of the tiny room, too afraid to draw breath. He suddenly knew what he was looking at.
After the girl from Operation Orpheus had disappeared, GCHQ must have pulled out all the stops to find her.
Assuming that the girl used her skills to go underground, GCHQ had set the search conditions that it knew.
They were looking for a girl born on 30 May 1983.
There were two hundred and fifty-three female babies born on that day in the United Kingdom that were still alive. And one of them was Tara.
Military intelligence must have had them all under surveillance, waiting to see whether one of them was their child assassin in hiding.
A cold dread crept up Caleb’s spine.
The destination of his line of thought was obvious now, but Caleb slowed down, squeezing the brakes and testing his underlying reasoning. Maybe it was a junk file? Maybe it was planted there on purpose by GCHQ for him to find?
The policeman had stood stock still in their bedroom, one of Tara’s diaries open in his hand. Caleb could see the handwriting over his shoulder, wild and sloping, as if tilting with the weight of the madness in the words. Government agents were after her, hiding in the shadows.
Caleb scrambled down mental corridors trying every door other than the one waiting open for him. But none of the doors opened. Finally, he realized he had no other choice.
Tara was right. She was being followed.
Caleb stared at the girl’s face on screen. Her escape, almost thirty years ago, had set in motion the chain of events that had ended, among other things, in Tara’s death. There was no direct link, no culpability flowing from one to the other. But these two women were part of the same story. A narrative with an overlapping set of actors, a shared history that ended in tragedy for the fragile Tara and a life in hiding for the girl. All the women on the list were co-opted into the same drama, suspended in a web of meaning spun from the same strands.
When he and Tara had met, Caleb was an optimist, which meant that to him the world was an enormous organic education machine, constructed to help him evolve. People and experiences were propelled into his path when he most needed them. The secret of life was not in creating opportunities, but in recognizing them when they were sent his way by the benevolent software on which the universe runs. Life was like falling backwards on to a bed of feathers. He had to worry for nothing because everything was provided.
And then Tara became out of sync, a bug in the system, something he could neither fix nor explain. Why had the universe made her this way? To what higher ground was all the paranoia and panic she brought to the world meant to take them? The bug could not be fixed, so the software had to be rewritten from scratch.
The universe was suddenly no longer intelligent, responsive to his needs, but cold and unfeeling. Not even cruel, as this would presuppose intelligence and intention. Just random. A series of events with no code to combine them. Before his mind could process her death, he built the high enclosure walls and devoted himself to work with a purpose that bordered on mania.
But now, for the first time in a long while, the world seemed no longer cold and random. Tara’s death had something to do with this girl. Life seemed powered once more by an intentional code, connecting events, pulling them together and, in this case, keeping secrets, hiding them from sight. A code that could be hacked.
He needed to find out about this girl, what made her special and why she was being hunted.