But to do this required a leap of genius: a leap to another level, one that contained and swallowed all the levels I’d been operating on up to now. Samuels’s offhand comment about dry-runs had opened the gateway to that other level for me; pushing the three bath-foam clusters together, and the revelation this had brought on, had propelled me up there. Yes: lifting the re-enactment out of its demarcated zone and slotting it back into the world, into an actual bank whose staff didn’t know it was a re-enactment: that would return my motions and my gestures to ground zero and hour zero, to the point at which the re-enactment merged with the event. It would let me penetrate and live inside the core, be seamless, perfect, real.
And so our goals aligned, mine and Naz’s. He needed me as much as I needed him. And need him I did, more than ever. In order for the re-enactment to pay off-to produce the defile Samuels had talked about, that sportsmanlike expansion in which we could move around and do our thing-we had to get everything coordinated absolutely perfectly. We’d have no chance to repeat it; there could be no slight mistimings, no slipping bin bags, leakage onto floors or falling cats-and certainly no skiving off and substituting tapes. And then not only was total control of movement and of matter necessary-every surface, every gesture, every last half-trip on a carpet’s kink-but so, too, was control of information. We had to treat information as matter: stop it spilling, seeping, trickling, dribbling, whatever: getting in the wrong place and becoming mess. That’s how bank robbers who get clean away from the scene of the robbery itself get tripped up, Samuels had told us earlier: someone speaks to someone who tells someone else who tells their girlfriend who tells three of her friends, and then soon it’s common knowledge and only a matter of time before the police get to hear about it.
“If our heist were a real one,” Naz explained to me as we sat alone in his office one evening, surrounded by his flow charts, “a normal one I mean, there’d be eight people involved: the five robbers, the two drivers and the show-out man.”
“The tight-end accomplice,” I said.
“Right,” said Naz. “But in our operation there are thirty-four primary re-enactors, plus six immediate back-up people, ones that need to be there all the time, although these ones will stop being necessary from the moment that the location transfers to the real bank-as, of course, will twenty-seven of the primary re-enactors-although to call them ‘unnecessary’ is misleading, as it’s necessary they continue to believe that they’ll be necessary right up until the last minute. So with thirty-four, plus six, plus eleven secondary back-up people and a further twenty-eight (at a conservative guess) tertiary ones-caterers, builders, taxi drivers, basically anyone who’s visited the warehouse more than once-you can appreciate that the probability of information leakage, were we to put even a handful of these people in the picture over the next few days, is pretty much one hundred per cent.”
“Well, then we just don’t tell them,” I said. “Any of them.”
“A: that doesn’t work,” Naz answered. “The drivers will need to have learnt escape routes-and secondary routes in case the first routes are blocked up, and tertiary ones and so on. B: that in itself is only half the problem-no, one third. Beside outward leakage both before and after the event, there’s the need to safeguard against inward leakage-re-enactors learning of your change of plan. And then there’s sideways leakage. Look: I’ve marked it here.”
He pointed to a flow chart in which arrows clustered round three circles. I thought of the foam clusters in the bath again, how I’d moved them apart and then together.
“By sideways leakage I mean leakage between different staff groups: re-enactor-re-enactor, re-enactor-back-up, back-up-secondary-back-up and so on. The permutations are multiple.”
“So what do we do?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve stratified all the participants into five NTK, or Need to Know, categories. Within each category there’s a twofold decision to be made: how much they need to know, and when they need to know it…”
He went on for ages like this. I zoned out and lost myself among the curves and arrows of the charts, tracing in them arcs and pirouettes, entrances and escape routes, defiles. It was light when Naz’s lecture stopped. The outcome seemed to be that his NTK structure was like a pyramid: at the top, in the first category, me and Naz; below us, in the second, the two driver re-enactors, in the next the five other robber re-enactors and so on, widening with each layer. Layer Two would have to be informed of the change of venue before other layers. Layer Three could be told at the final minute, and even then wouldn’t be told that the real bank staff wouldn’t know that this was a re-enactment, or even be told that they were real bank staff. We’d just say we’d brought in new staff, public and security guard re-enactors to make it all seem fresher and more realistic. As for Layer Four…
“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Let’s go back up to the warehouse.”
I was impatient to get back to it all-back to the movement, the swinging arcs, the peeling shoulders. When we got there I announced:
“We’re going to add a bit to the whole sequence now. We’re going to practise getting into cars and driving off.”
“Oh yes?” said Samuels.
“Yes,” I told him. “Widen it out a bit.”
He choreographed this over the next two days: who ran to which car, which pulled out first, how one, turning, paused for a moment in the middle of the road to block the traffic so the other could cut off into a side street. We marked these roads’ beginnings out in paint, extending the carefully copied markings we’d done earlier out of the warehouse’s wide hangar-door entrance onto the concrete of the airport ground outside. I wanted the markings done as accurately as possible: the white Give Way dashes, the yellow lines. There was this one big, dark patch on the concrete where some engine oil or tar must have been spilt before we moved there; it was semi-solid, like black mould or a small growth or birth mark sprouting from the surface of the ground. I told Annie’s people to remove it, scrub it off. There wasn’t an oil patch on the road in Chiswick. They went at it with brushes, then with trowels, then with all types of chemicals, but it was unshiftable. On the third day of running through the getaway sequence, after I’d put a marker in for myself so that I could watch it from the outside-the cars turning, stopping, cutting, looping back-this dark patch kept snagging my attention as the cars cut past it. It was annoying me. I thought of something that the short councillor had said to me a few days earlier, and called Naz over.
“What?” he asked.
“I’d like you to have the word ‘residual’ looked up.”
“Residual?”
“R-e-s-i-d-u-a-l.”
Naz tapped a message into his mobile, then stood with me watching the cars turn and cut. His eyes, still sunk, glowed darkly. After a while he said:
“We’ll need to disappear afterwards.”
“Disappear?” I said. I looked up at the sky. It was blue. It was a bright, clear early autumn day. “How can we disappear?”
“Get out. Cover our tracks. We should remove all traces of our activities here, and get ourselves and all the re-enactors well out of the picture.”
“Where can we all go?” I asked.
“It’s very complicated,” Naz said. “There are several…”
Just then, his phone beeped. He scrolled through his menu and read:
“Of or pertaining to that which is left-e.g. in mathematics.”