43

As they left the motorway, the silence in the car was total. The city skyline had long since thinned out and gone, city had given way to suburb, residential areas to industrial estates, and then the darkness and the countryside took over completely. With the fields came the mist. Everything became blurred, the inky blackness ahead of them turned light grey in their headlights, and the only thing that told them they were moving was the constant stream of white lines.

Gradually, the lines became smaller. The road narrowed, surrounded by frozen fields on either side. Ahead, a huge, shapeless oscillation of light was growing sharper and clearer in the mist.

‘I know what this is going to sound like.’

That was the first thing Rebecca had said for several minutes, and William waited for what was coming next, but she just sat staring straight ahead, not saying a word, making tiny adjustments with the wheel on the almost straight country road.

Slowly, the light ahead of them coalesced into a building, an enormous cigar of glass and steel that seemed to cut loose from the damp, illuminated by icy cold industrial floodlights.

‘Have you heard of psychotronics?’ she said after a long wait.

William stared at her.

‘And here’s me thinking I’m the one who’s losing it,’ he said.

He peered over at her, hoping for a smile, some kind of ironic grimace confirming that they were on the same page. There was none. When he eventually looked away he could feel the unease swelling in his chest.

What if they don’t even need that?

‘Of course I have heard of psychotronics,’ he said after a long pause. ‘And I’ve heard of MKUltra. Just like I’ve heard of the tooth fairy and Father Christmas.’

Rebecca still said nothing. He let his back sink into the seat, thoughts taking shape, thoughts he didn’t want to think.

There were countless conspiracy theories about the Cold War. Psychotronics was just one of them. The superpowers of the day had been obsessed with two things, and those things had combined to eliminate all traces of rational thought. The first was to secure a position of superiority, regardless of the cost, and to never fall behind. The second was to constantly speculate about what projects the other side was engaged in.

A child could see how this would lead to a self-fulfilling rumour mill, but the world wasn’t run by children but by middle-aged men, and the outcome was an ever greater fear of the other side’s success. That in turn led to scientific research that no sensible person would ever have allowed to take place.

One of those projects was the CIA’s MKUltra.

For long periods in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, huge sums had been ploughed into projects about telepathy, brainwashing and mind reading. In big futuristic laboratories, rows of earnest men in uniforms and white coats had stood behind one-way mirrors, and quite seriously observed the efforts of their subjects to telepathically communicate geometric shapes to one another.

In the East, the same thing had been known as psychotronics. And needless to say, it hadn’t worked for them either. It hadn’t worked because it was impossible, and when the race between East and West had finally run its course the projects had been shut down and classified, presumably more out of embarrassment at what they had been doing than to keep any progress secret.

With hindsight, it was silly, laughable, nothing more. It was pseudoscience, nonsense bred out of desperation in an era when science did not know what it does today. And yet—

‘If you’re trying to tell me that that’s how they know I’m here,’ William said, ‘if you seriously believe that someone’s been reading my thoughts… I don’t think you’d like to read what I think of that.’

He let his gaze drift into the non-existent view ahead of them. Felt his jaws tightening, because in spite of everything, there was still a little part of him that was already saying what if. Only he could have known about the email from Piotrowski. Only he could have known that he’d decided to head for Warsaw. And even he hadn’t known that he was going to check in to the Hotel New York until the very moment that he did so.

Despite all of that, they had found him. Of all the millions of cameras in all the world they had happened to choose that one, a camera in a country where he shouldn’t even be, and the chances of all that happening at random were so infinitesimally small that there had to be another explanation.

There was–and he didn’t like it one bit.

‘With all due respect,’ he said, in a voice that contained nothing of the sort. ‘With all fucking respect, that stuff is no more than sophisticated nonsense.’

Instead of replying, she took her foot off the gas, let the car slow down on the narrow road and waited for the turning that she knew was going to emerge from the mist.

The building. That’s where they were heading. From up close, it looked like a solitary airship being born from the Earth’s core, countless storeys of glass shooting straight up from the ground with countless tiny spotlights in all the countless offices inside. The large car park unfolding in front of them must have been thousands of square metres and yet not a single car was parked there. Undeterred, she continued across the deserted area, not stopping until she arrived in the far corner, a patch where the powerful industrial floodlights on their high masts could not quite reach.

She turned off the engine, and sat quietly as she tried to formulate her response. ‘You’re right. I’m not going to deny that. For three, four decades, a lot of stuff went on that with hindsight seems anything but sensible. Research driven by fear, superstition, fantasy. They were fumbling in the dark, because the dark was all there was to fumble in.’ Again she shrugged her shoulders. ‘But we’ve come a long way since then.’

‘We?’

‘That’s right.’

She took the keys from the ignition, got out of the car and started walking into the darkness.

It was only once they got inside that William realised how big the building really was. Above them, the enormous lobby stretched upwards like a great column of nothing, a great atrium of air all the way up, at least thirty storeys, to a glass ceiling with the lead-grey night sky above it. The floors of the building wove around the atrium in loop after loop of curvaceous balcony, walkways that formed complete circles in front of the glass walls of offices which lay in darkness.

In the centre of the lobby was a reception desk, as round and clinical as everything else, made of white metal and glass, and with the names of the building’s tenant companies etched into steel plaques behind it. It was divided into two semicircles, and on the floor between them were two unoccupied workstations. The lights were off, the computer and TV screens flickering to themselves, alone and without an audience.

William panned across the rows of static CCTV, the entrance, the car park, and there, in a dark corner: their car. And last of all—

It was no surprise of course, yet it still put a knot in his stomach. There, on one of the many monitors, he saw himself. Dark blue suit, baseball cap and windcheater, leaning on the reception desk and with his eyes fixed on a screen which–if the resolution had been high enough–would in turn have shown him, looking at a screen, and so on into infinity.

‘William?’

Rebecca’s voice echoed around the vast space. At the edge of the ground floor, three transparent lift shafts reached up through the storeys above, and she was standing by one of them, the door to the glass lift open in front of her. She beckoned him over.

‘What is this place?’ he asked as he joined her.

‘That depends who you ask. According to the prospectus, this is Eastern Europe’s leading centre for scientific research and development.’

She pushed the top button and William could feel them moving, shooting upwards like a pneumatic post capsule in a world where they were the only ones alive.

‘If you ask me, it’s a bloody expensive glass tower that hadn’t reckoned with the financial crisis.’

From below, the various floors had seemed small and claustrophobic, but as they stepped out onto the highest gangway William realised how wrong he had been. Beyond their glass walls, he could see whole office landscapes opening out, with doors leading to meeting rooms and kitchenettes, and far over there, on the other side of everything, were the massive glass windows and the dark grey night outside.

The gangway led to an anonymous glass door, and Rebecca pulled out a keycard, punched in a code, and waited for the lock to let them pass.

‘Welcome,’ she said as she continued into the darkness on the other side.

‘Thanks,’ said William, stopping just inside the door. ‘To what, if I may ask?’

She answered without a smile. ‘Welcome to Michal Piotrow­ski’s sophisticated nonsense.’