D-Zero Meson Oscillation, 9/10

A few twists, a paramour, and the real spy...

Previously…

For Tom, it seemed to him when he thought back later that his memory of the events of the following three weeks or so passed like a long blur, or some montage sequence from a film. He recognised the latter as his unconscious being provoked by Katrina’s rambling on about her movie career. Even down to the intricate details of camera angles in specific scenes.

Katrina as Wonder Woman crouched atop the Chrysler Building, little red cape billowing behind her in the wind, with a double-bladed extendable dagger in her left hand, laced with glowing green kryptonite. Black and white film noir style with that flash of emerald colour. The camera encircles her clockwise as she clicks the extension at both ends, then Superman smashes through from the other side, both tumbling down rightwards towards ground and knocking the weapon out of her hand. It clatters against a wall then skitters beneath a vehicle. See it from the camera’s point of view. The two of them arcing through the air towards you and crashing onto the roof of a car right in front of the camera. Katrina twists them onto the pavement towards the camera, less than a metre away, smashes her fist down at Superman’s head but he dodges and flings her over the camera to impact hard against the wall.

Katrina described the rest of this iconic fight sequence in such blow-by-blow detail that by the end of it Tom felt like he’d seen the entire movie a dozen times.

Malcolm said that people with delusions are experts at drawing you in and convincing you of the truth of their fantasyworld. But the internal contradictions will always show up in the end.

But not in Katrina’s case. There was just too much detail.

And too much rationality in everything she said and the manner in which she said it. She was no more insane than he was.

She was reluctant at first to reveal the entire plot of each film until he insisted he didn’t mind about spoilers, given the unlikelihood of his ever being able to see any of them, despite her telling him she was minded to remake them if ever she had the chance. For some, of course, this would not be possible, given they’d already been made in his world. But the little differences were intriguing.

Perhaps she’d just do the deleted scenes.

The synthesis of his memories of that time were also due to the ease with which she settled into a surprisingly self-disciplined routine. Surprising likewise that she could take such matters as security and classified information seriously and responsibly, despite being a teenager and a KGB spy – and a convicted one at that. Tom reckoned if he’d been given one of your great English pounds for every time Katrina responded to his questions with a straight ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that’ he would’ve had enough for a fat retirement in Vanuatu, or some other paradise island.

Katrina would go for a run at 7 every morning for half an hour, throwing out a cheery ‘Bonjour’ or wave to the locals getting ready for their own day, who happily delighted in the regular passing of this charming English rose. It was not until the second week that Tom realised she’d been luring the watchers into a false sense of habit. From day eight she started randomly modulating her jogging route, to such an extent they gave up trying to keep up with her by the third week. Lining every variation of her route would’ve taken far too many men. Tom admired this and it made him chuckle. He loved her sense of mischief.

She seemed to become brighter as the days wore on and grew darker as midwinter approached. She was clearly becoming more accepting of her fate in this other world, that she would not be going back. Her initial resignation to the fact soon gave way to a growing optimism. She had an increasingly airy lightness that Tom found infectious. She told more jokes too as time progressed, and he realised he’d never met a girl with whom he’d ever laughed so much.

And of course at the same time he knew she would be leaving him soon. He realised all too intimately that he just never wanted her to go.

In the mornings and most afternoons Katrina would go swimming. Her personal bests seemed to improve daily. With that kind of determination, he thought, she was sure to make the team. Sometimes they would meet for lunch in some quaint little brasserie, occasionally they would go out for dinner, other times, evenings when she was not being debriefed, she would show off what an accomplished cook she was, and they would watch some movie together. Those were the times he could well believe she really was thirty years older on the inside. She was a wife once, and a mother. She had a family.

And she was a widow. That, too, emerged sometimes. She didn’t like to talk about Sasha at first, especially when Peter told her he really did exist in this world and was still alive. But he had a family of his own. He still worked in Yasenevo, presumably still engaging himself in mischievous plots designed to bring down the decadent British Establishment.

But he was not her Sasha. It would be too painful. She resolved never to meet him. Never to even think about him. He was dead. He was not hers.

There were two incidents which lodged themselves in Tom’s mind, in detail in contrast to the fleeting and elusive blur that was everything else.

In the Louvre, standing together in front of the Mona Lisa. “Is her smile the same in your world?”

Katrina tilted her head to one side and examined her. Then she looked across at him and flashed one of her own mischievous smiles.

“I think our Lisa is a little more self-confident.”

That one made him laugh too.

The other time they were strolling in the Tuileries Gardens. Katrina coughed a few times and told him how dirty the air was and how clean it is in her Paris, and her London. How Britannia is ninety percent self-sufficient for its food and it’s nearly all small-scale, independent organic farmers and how everyone is so much more healthy and happy and full of hope for the beautiful future.

And it had never been more clear to Tom that he was living in a dystopia. He could even feel the contrast, eating away at him on the inside.

And he felt like he’d been born into the wrong universe.

And he didn’t want her to go.

#

“There’s nothing else?”

Katrina shook her head. “No. Nothing else. That’s it. Everything.”

Peter clicked stop on the digital recorder, removed the USB and sealed it in an envelope, destined for a diplomatic bag and the counter-intelligence section.

“That’s quite a story. Enough to keep CI busy for years. Like Mitrokhin.”

“I hope,” Katrina said, “that’s more than a fair price for a passport and ticket home?”

“Oh yes. In fact, I’ll give you more than just those two things.”

“Oh?”

“8.09.67 in Barcelona, you say?”

“Yep. And 7.59.82 in Atlanta. Although I’m not sure I believe that one.”

“Me neither. Ah, you must be back to Nikita now, eh?”

She just shrugged in a distinctly Slavic manner.

Peter shook the dissonance out of his head and quickly recovered. “But, I’ve been doing a little research into competitive swimming and it’s quite clear that at the rate you’re improving you will not only make the team, but you’re likely to win a few medals in Birmingham. That means you’ll have a salary from British Swimming plus a significant amount from sponsorship, especially given those Silver Screen looks of yours.”

“That’s a nice complement. Thank you.”

“Pleasure. But it was meant as a compliment.”

Sly, knowing, smile. A Katrina smile.

“I mean it. And if I hadn’t already been through my mid-life crisis I’d tell you I wished I was twenty years younger.”

“And not happily married either, eh?”

Peter sniggered. “That too, obviously. Anyway, alongside fast-tracking your passport I’ll get agent support to give you all the other necessary documents that make for a real person. Birth certificate, driving licence and so on.”

Katrina smiled. “You’re giving me an alias, is what you’re saying.”

“Yep. It’s just easier that way. And fun, obviously. But I’ll also give you a bank account with enough inside so you don’t have to rely on the utterly insufficient welfare payments or food banks.”

“Well, that’s what you get from a Tory government.”

“Quite. And I didn’t vote for them, by the way. I care about my country.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“You will, naturally, also need a cover story. It’ll be blindingly obvious to anyone doing even a cursory vet that you don’t have an existence prior to showing up here. So Malcolm will prepare a version of your psych report suggesting disassociation following some as yet undetermined trauma. So feel free to ramble on about your parallel world stuff.”

“Is this where you go all Modesty Blaise on me, Sir Gerald?”

“Hah! We’ll see about that. In the meantime, you said you wanted to go back to Cambridge?”

“Yes, please.”

“Then I’ll arrange a few flats for you to view. And you’ll have enough money to pay the rent and eat well until you make the national team. But then you’ll have to pay me back.”

“Isn’t that going to look a little suspicious?”

“Yes, Comrade Nikita. And that can’t be avoided. Which is why I’m taking a leaf out of your book. The Nash equilibrium. An expression of supreme self-confidence and control. I’ll say we’re letting you in precisely to set you up so we can keep surveillance on you and see what you get up to. You’re clearly not an imminent threat. So studying you seems like the best option.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

“Quite. And the enemy are arrogant enough to believe it. Besides, you winning medals at the Games and flashing that coy smile of yours while you’re at it will do wonders for British prestige. You’ll be invited to Downing Street, possibly even get to meet the Queen. What say you?”

She didn’t really need to answer that one.

She just flashed him one of her coy smiles. “Although,” she noted, “I don’t think you should be calling me Comrade anymore, what with all these listening devices everywhere.”

“Hah! I do sweep this place every morning, you know. If I was that stupid the MI6’s counter-intelligence would’ve caught me by now, wouldn’t they?”

“I suppose.”

“But now,” he was enjoying this, she could tell, “thanks to your father’s little ruse, we not only have an immunity for our top agent in Britain, Sarah, that is, who they think had long-since retired, but I myself have total access to all the relevant files. Not to mention the impending case file on you. And the files on whatever’s going to happen. I’m already guessing they’ll codename it Vigil.”

“You know you can take the double bluff too far, Peter. Katrina may have been brilliant at it, but she did have to defect in the end, remember? I’m sure British Intelligence aren’t as stupid as you want them to be. They’ve learned a lot since the Cold War.”

“Point taken. But they are arrogant, as such they will not want to believe they’ve been royally fooled. And before you start worrying, yes, of course I switched the DNA samples and the original CCTV footage no longer exists. The tech guys will not find a thing. So, I would say we’ve successfully passed the first test. The real game theory, as you put it, will start in the new year. Once you’ve got yourself settled in, of course.”

She sighed, but reluctantly agreed.

But then he did look sympathetic, and curious at the same time. “It must still be strange, having Katrina’s memories alongside your own personality?”

“Yes. Back in Moscow when it happened I was just, I don’t know, so disoriented. Father got in such a state about it! Then I, or maybe Katrina, I don’t know, told him all about this other world of hers and I got more used to her and that’s when he hatched his ridiculous plan.”

“But you didn’t want to do it, did you?”

She shook her head. “No. But then he said we’ve got nothing to lose, if the enemy’s planning on starting World War Three with us anyway. So yeah, I agreed in the end. Besides, Katrina wanted to do it, and she wouldn’t let me say no. It’s like a multiple personality disorder you see, except my alter is a consciousness from a parallel world. But Malcolm’s coping mechanisms are helping. And he does understand dissociative identity disorder. I reckon a few months and I’ll have assimilated Katrina completely.”

“Quantum teleportation, you say? D-zero meson oscillation?”

She shook her head. “Katrina’s world is not that advanced. She initially thought it was divine intervention or something, but no, it was the ETIs at Alpha Centauri. In 2017 the other world’s J2B space telescope confirmed the habitability of the third planet. 92% gravity, nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, water vapour, 600ppm CO2. Magnetic field.”

“Sounds like a tropical paradise.”

“Sure. And the BLC-1 signal confirmed the ETI presence at Centauri. Predictably they covered it up in this world.”

“And according to their Wow! signal we have three years to be on course for a utopia?”

“Or they will have to intervene, to protect themselves. 16 November 2024. 11.26 precisely. This world will suffer a catastrophe, the likes of which -”

“Then the more you ramble on about Katrina’s socialist utopia the better. You will inspire a generation and that generation will undermine the British Establishment, and then the domino effect will begin. The contrast with this world will be profoundly clear. And how to fix it.”

“The enemy will kill me, you know? They’re not adapted for survival in a utopia.”

“By that time it’ll be too late, by definition.”

“They’ll distract the public. Make them forget all about me.”

“No, they won’t. We’ll make sure of it. Because we’ll be there to expose them when they try. And the people’s righteous anger will rise up and that will be the end of the Anglo-American Empire. And there will be no WW3. Your sacrifice will save billions. And your reward will be a new incarnation, in a better world. Katrina’s world. You’ll get to go home with her.”

She looked down sadly. “Will you tell my father -”

“He’s already proud of you. Always remember that, Comrade Voronin.”

Katrina, or was it Nikita still? Neither of them could hardly tell the difference anymore. So maybe it was both of them who sighed for a few moments whilst Peter looked on in sympathy. Then she raised her eyes and smiled faintly again. “He’s sweet, isn’t he? Tom, I mean.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Are you jealous?”

“What do you think, Nikita Alexandrovna? Of course I’m jealous…”

##

Final part here…