D-Zero Meson Oscillation, 5/10

Part V, Dinner, & postmodernist fanfiction?

Previous

Peter leaned back in his chair and flashed a cunning smile at the otherworldly siren sitting opposite.

“The Nash equilibrium. Very amusing.”

“And very KGB too, perhaps?”

He laughed. “Clearly they’re still as arrogant as they always were.”

“I prefer to call it self-confidence. But I don’t work for them anymore. And I have no desire to either, I can assure you. You of all people in this building will understand how constantly stressful it is being a real spy in enemy territory. MI5 don’t really get it, but we do, don’t we?”

Peter let out a quick breath. “I guess by that you’re telling me you’ve already got the measure of that pleasant young buck from Five?”

“He’s sweet, yes. If a little naïve. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be a honey or a plant.”

“Not at first, no.”

“You had to remind him, though, I take it?”

“Very perceptive.”

“So are you saying you believe me, about the parallel world?”

“Not in the slightest. But I do believe in your information and I’m willing to go along for the ride. I like to keep my enemies close, study them.”

“Very arrogant.”

“I prefer to call it self-confidence.”

“Touché.”

“For example. Question.” Peter jabbed an accusing finger at her. “Do you believe Sarah is an acceptable sacrifice?”

“Assuming her immunity and no harm coming to her, in exchange for my confession and a passport, yes.”

“Hmm. You must really want this passport, then.”

“Can you promise you won’t harm her?”

Peter hesitated, then said, “I don’t think I’m in a position to promise anything at this stage. I can give you an educated guess, though, which is that if the immunity offer is there in front of her she’ll be relieved to finally confess. In which case no coercion necessary.”

“We all want to confess, in the end. You will too, one day.”

Peter smiled. No point trying to hide anything from this girl, clearly. “And did you confess, in this other world you claim to come from?”

“When I was older, yes. It was part of the condition for my being Russian Ambassador to Britannia and Britain joining NEA.”

“NEA?”

“The New Eurasian Alliance. It replaced NATO soon after 9/11. I can go through our entire timeline with you later. Like I told Tom, I’m not going anywhere and I really do need a passport and ticket to England and a new start.”

Peter laughed ironically again. “And do you want this passport in the name of Katrina Meyer, or Modesty Blaise?”

“That’s exceptionally amusing. I like it. And not a little ironic, as it happens.”

“Well, you do look somewhat like her.”

“Except for the pouty red lips, sure. It’s ironic because I played her in our first three movie adaptations. And this year, in my world, my 18-year-old daughter Nikita is playing her in the origin story, In the beginning.”

“How very postmodern.”

“Well, I was known as the Queen of Postmodernism.”

Peter shook his head with a mixture of scepticism and admiration. “You, little Miss Meyer, will clearly never cease to amaze. And I get the impression you are precisely the kind of girl who always gets the last laugh.”

Katrina smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as such. Tracking you on that phone I gave you likewise. Watching you fool the algorithm in realtime was a genuine pleasure. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Absolutely not. And maybe I felt I needed to give you a demonstration.”

“Understandable. And well-received. To answer your question about Sarah, the few extra snippets my counter-intelligence friend in London has discovered tell me to take you seriously. However, if you want your passport and her immunity, I’m going to need more to go on.”

Katrina sighed. “I thought you’d say that. Her codename is NIMZO, and her false recruitment story is her mother taking her to the Russian Embassy in Prague in 1972 under cover of the Munich Games.”

“And that’s enough to convince her the ‘defector’ is genuine?”

“Yes. There can’t be more than three other people who know that. So she’ll talk. And so will I, once I see her signed immunity document.”

Peter held up his hands and smiled. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, go easy on Fun Boy Five, eh?”

Katrina smiled. A little slyly, admittedly.

#

It didn’t take Katrina long to clock the watchers in the restaurant. A couple with a distinctive English look about them. Already there when they arrived, which told Katrina they knew in advance where Tom was taking her. Given it was MI6 who took care of foreign surveillance operations she guessed Peter had told Tom where to go.

She decided not to mention it, or let the watchers know she’d spotted them. She also determined she’d have a bit of fun with Tom, make him work for the information rather than volunteer it. She could tell he was unused to this kind of fieldwork and would be constantly thinking of some excuse to ask probing questions. She tried not to show her amusement, although a part of her didn’t want to try too hard.

The truth is, she liked him. He reminded her of someone she once loved.

She managed to steer him away from classified questions until after the garçon had cleared away their appetisers. Little need for whispering amid the clink and clatter of cutlery and waiters and the incessant murmuring chatter of other conversations. She swished the Côtes du Rhône around her mouth and decided to ask a leading question.

“Are you fluent in French, Tom?”

“Naturellement. Oxford, Modern European Languages.”

“Ah, the other place. So why didn’t you join the Circus? Or did they not give you a tap on the shoulder?”

“Erm, why would that make me join MI6?”

“Let’s just say I’ve met more than one MI6 type who read Modern European Languages at Oxford. Sarah did, for example. It seemed somewhat de rigueur. So how did you end up in Five instead?”

“I applied.”

“I beg your pardon? You just applied? Like Philby?”

Tom chuckled. “Like Philby. Very funny. MI5 accept direct applications.”

“So no clandestine invitation from your tutor, then. Which college?”

“You,” said Tom, who decided he was enjoying this, “are incorrigible.”

She took another sip of wine without taking her eyes off him. “Yep. I am absolutely incorrigible. So which college?”

“Magdalene.”

“Thank you for answering the question, Tom. I didn’t expect you to.”

“You mentioned ‘the other place’ – you’re saying you went to Cambridge?”

“Trinity,” Katrina grinned, “like Philby.”

“Hah! You couldn’t really have gone anywhere else, could you! What did you read?”

“History. From 1991-1994. Then I did a Masters in Medieval History. It kept me occupied while I was in Holloway.”

“Holloway? You mean the prison, Holloway?”

She nodded and gulped her wine. “I was held there on remand when I was prosecuted for breaking His Majesty’s Official Secrets Act 1911. Twelve charges. Fourteen year maximum sentence each.”

“That sounds serious.”

Katrina burst out laughing.

Fortunately the waiter arrived with the next course, so she left it hanging there. If he thought she was joking, that was just fine by her.

#

“So what happened?” Tom continued his questioning, munching happily on a morsel of Magret de Canard. “When they put you on trial, I mean?”

Katrina put her wine back down. “I was found guilty on four of the twelve charges.”

“So what sentence did you get?”

“Fourteen years. Minus time served, which was about two months.”

“Now I’m confused. That means you must’ve gone to prison for a long time. So how did you do all the other things you mentioned?”

“Two words. Jury nullification.”

“Erm, what is jury nullification?”

“It’s an obscure part of English law whereby the jury can find the defendant guilty, but nullify the sentence if they believe the defendant’s actions were justified. To prevent a much greater harm, for example. ‘Overwhelming mitigating circumstances’ was the exact phrase they used. You remember I mentioned operation Game Theory? Identifying and rooting out the Mossad infiltration network?”

“Yes. So that was the greater good, essentially?”

“Pretty much, yes. All the information I passed to the KGB was during that operation. We successfully argued that I didn’t have a choice if I wanted the KGB’s help, without which the operation couldn’t have succeeded.”

“That does make sense, sure. So your sentence was, what, suspended?”

“Precisely. With conditions, like I’m not allowed to talk to the KGB or visit Russia or get involved in political campaigning, like with the Green Party, which shortly afterwards, almost in protest, changed their name to the Lizzies.”

“And eventually won a landslide in 2003?”

“And turned our country into a utopia, yes. And ended the Anglo-American alliance.”

Tom looked thoughtful again and decided to refill their glasses.

“We did have a trump card of course, the authorisation defence. Sarah had it noted on my P6 agent file. Although we really didn’t want to have to play it because it would’ve blown my P6 cover and they would’ve suspected Sarah later. I said I was recruited in Moscow in June 1990, when I first met Sasha. So I genuinely took my chances with the jury.”

“So you must’ve been recruited by her before the KGB?”

“No, but according to my MI6 file, yes.”

“You’ll have to explain that one.”

“Happily. I was actually recruited by the KGB via the Stasi in Dresden, August 1989. Sarah met me at Gatwick on my return and initiated my P6 recruitment process, although when I first met her I didn’t know she was a fellow traveller. So that was a bit nerve-wracking, to be honest. The following day Anna came round and made the formal recruitment. Not long after Sarah told me who she really was. Then we had to think of a cover story, because Anna was mentioned in a barium meal Sasha gave to the defector Mitrokhin in 1984 to discredit him and all his information.”

“So they suspected you because of your association with her?”

“Yes. And they threatened her to make me confess. So Anna told her false recruitment story under duress. Later I said I told her what to say because I was worried they would hurt her to get to me. Her cover story was that she’d simply been made to look like a spy, to keep MI5 busily misdirected. We only needed to prove the KGB knew all about Mitrokhin and fed him misinformation.”

“Except she really was a spy?”

“Recruited a year earlier than she said, like me.”

Tom chortled. “So was she on trial with you too?”

“Yes, and the cover story worked. Not guilty. The prosecution made the mistake of calling Mitrokhin to the stand. Our defence team slaughtered him. He was left utterly humiliated because he couldn’t accept that he’d been used and that the KGB knew all about him. By the end he just kept on ranting and raving – in Russian! You can imagine what the jury thought! The interpreter couldn’t keep up and he just looked an idiot. It was extremely amusing.”

“Sounds a bit cruel to me.”

“Really? Remember we’re talking about a guy who betrayed his country for twelve years. So don’t think he deserves any sympathy.”

“That’s a fair point. This all sounds very convoluted, though?”

“That’s because one, you’re getting me tipsy, and two, nowadays you’ve lost sight of the true arts of espionage, as we practiced during the Cold War. Today everything’s just a computer algorithm crunching metadata.”

Tom looked a little embarrassed. “That’s another fair point. Conceded.”

Katrina winked, then smiled slyly and disarmingly at him, slicing gleefully into the duck as she did so.

“So what you’re really saying here is that both of you were just engaging in an outrageous double-bluff?”

“Yep. All the information could be disproven. Reasonable doubt and all that. My codename, for example.”

Tom perked up even more, leaned forward discernibly. “Which was?”

“My fake one was Osya. Admittedly it’s a bit obscure but the jury loved it.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Ah. So you don’t know what the Russian word ‘Osya’ means?”

“My Russian’s not that good.”

“Ok. It means ‘wasp’.”

“Oh. Like Lisbeth Salander?”

Katrina laughed, then looked suspiciously at him. “Are you saying you not only have those books too but her handle was also Wasp?”

“Erm, yes. Why’s that strange?”

“Because in my world Stieg Larsson chose Wasp as a pop culture reference to me. Except I didn’t exist in your world, did I?”

“That is weird, yes. You do have a bit of Lisbeth about you though.” Tom waggled his finger at her. “The goth thing, for example.”

“Lol. Although that’s about the only thing I have in common with her. Still, I could’ve played her in our movie adaptations too if I’d been younger. Except my nose isn’t aquiline like hers. Also, like I said to Joss Whedon, you can only take postmodernism so far. Playing Death in Sandman Insomnia was one thing, but Lisbeth would’ve been a stretch. Still, I guess that’s further proof of MMT.”

“MMT?”

“Multiversal Molecule Theory. Universes with the same laws of physics are entangled. They clump together to form molecules, which connect with other molecules to form the multiverse. What that looks like is best left to the philosophers. But it solves a lot of the problems and anomalies in the Standard Model.”

“Right. Who’s Joss Whedon?”

Katrina pulled a face at him. “Erm, Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”

“Ah. That was him? Ok.”

Katrina shook her head in exasperation. “You really have missed out, haven’t you? Clearly you’re going to need a little more education on the pop culture front.”

“Happily. I could definitely see you doing Xena though.”

“Hmm. At least you’ve heard of her. They did ask me but I wasn’t willing to commit to a series. Besides, traipsing around in bikini mail wouldn’t have done my image any good. I suppose you’re a Game of Thrones fan too, eh, if you like that sort of thing?”

“Huge fan, yes. Please tell me you were in your world’s version?”

“No way. Take my clothes off every other episode then suffer a gruesome unexpected death? I don’t think so. I’m a sophisticated actress don’t you know.”

“Lol. So why did Osya make the jury laugh?”

“You know what the German for wasp is?”

“’Wespe’.”

“Correct. So?”

“I still don’t get it.”

Katrina sighed. “Think Casino Royale.”

Tom glanced away for a moment and searched his memory. Then suddenly, “Oh! Like Vesper Lynd!”

“British agent blackmailed into working for the Russians.”

“Hah! That’s really clever. Obscure, I agree, but clever.”

“It’s a joke codename, basically.”

Tom chortled. “I like it! Have all your codenames got pop culture references?”

“Pretty much, yes. I’m the Queen of Postmodernism, me.”

“Right,” Tom kept on smiling and tried to flash his most charming look. “So what was your real codename?”

Katrina smiled slyly at him with another mischievous glint. “Isn’t this duck just divine, darling?”

“Oh, now that’s not fair!”

“Oh, yes it is! I’ve got to keep you interested somehow. Besides, you can’t expect me not to make you work for the information, eh?”

Tom sighed. “It’s still not fair.”

Katrina swished the wine around her glass, looked up at him with her disarming eyes, and took an ostentatiously slow gulp.

But if you’d been able to ask him at the time, Tom would’ve told you just how much he was enjoying himself.

#

“How long were you married?” he continued to munch.

“Five years. 1998-2003.” She tried to say it matter-of-factly, but it still came out sad.

“I’m sorry. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“Maybe another time.”

Tom paused, then asked, “Does this mean you lived in Russia? I mean,” he lowered his voice, “defected?”

“I personally didn’t call it defecting, but after the Moscow Apartment Bombings the British Establishment, and Blair’s government, said that I had.

“How so?”

“Because when I moved to Moscow I was not permitted to have anything to do with the FSB. But when the first bomb happened I insisted on helping them try and stop the other attacks. So they called me a defector, and I was effectively an exile. They said I would be arrested if I ever set foot on British territory again. Despite the fact I helped save hundreds of lives.”

“You were able to stop the other bombs?”

“Not all of them. The second one got through, but we stopped the others. Litvinenko got away, but he was linked to another suspect, Dekkushev. And I interrogated him. Ordered by the CIA he said it was, as usual. When I became Ambassador later I was able to question Litvinenko, and because he knew what I’d done to the other guy he told me everything.”

“Erm, what you’d done?”

“I’d rather not talk about it. I had to do some very questionable things, Tom. And I knew I would have to do penance for them, but I was prepared to make that sacrifice to save those innocent lives. Please don’t ask me about it.”

Tom looked a little embarrassed, but thought better of pursuing the subject. Even if it did lead to a brief uncomfortable silence.

Katrina didn’t like uncomfortable silences either, so she broke it first. “You know I’ve noticed the anti-Russian propaganda going on in this world and, well, you know that’ll lead to World War Three. Stopping that was one of the main reasons I joined the KGB in the first place. People called me a traitor, mainly for selfish political gain. But I know I wasn’t. I wasn’t so small-minded that I thought of a nationalistic us and them mentality. I didn’t just serve one country against another. I served humanity as a whole. You understand?”

Tom nodded. “Actually, yes. I do understand.” Then he added, sheepishly, “I hope you believe that?”

Katrina smiled warmly at him. “Pour me another glass of this excellent wine, and I’ll say yes.”

Tom, naturellement, did as he was told.

#

Later he walked her back to the hotel. They stopped outside the door. The tipsy part of him wanted to make a pass at her, another more sensible part told him that would be an idiot thing to do.

She could sense it too, and didn’t want to embarrass him. Not at this stage, anyway. She smiled fondly up at him nevertheless.

“May I ask you one last question?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Were you wearing a wire tonight?”

He shook his head. “No. I promise.”

She glanced at his wrist. “So that’s not a standard issue watch, then? The one with the microphone.”

He laughed and turned his wrist over. “They don’t let the likes of me have watches like that. More’s the pity.”

Katrina smiled, convincingly. “I believe you. If you were MI6 I wouldn’t, but they’re a completely different sort, they are. You have to watch out for them.”

“I’m kind of aware of that. Obviously that means you too though, right?”

Katrina flashed him a final coy smile. “Goodnight, Tom. Thank you for a lovely evening.”

“Likewise. See you tomorrow?”

“Like I said, I’m not going anywhere. I have nowhere else to go, remember?”

Then she turned away, closing the door behind her, leaving Tom alone in the street with his thoughts.

He looked down and frowned to himself, then gently clicked one of the little buttons on his standard issue watch. The one with the microphone…

##

Next Part VI