and society. The records of universities, technical colleges and schools. Galleries rose up to the domed ceiling. Swing doors led to the specialised archives and collections: keys, said a notice, could be collected from the desk by the holder of appropriate authorisation.
The foundation of any security organisation is its archives. That was what Commander Chazia had said in her address to the assembled police and militia of the Podchornok Oblast the previous year. Lom and Ziller had arrived late to find the room over-filled and over-hot. They had to stand at the back, craning to get a decent view between the bullet heads of a pair of gendarmes from Siflosk. Deputy Laurits had made a long and unctuous speech of welcome. The visit of the great Lavrentina Chazia, head of Vlast Secret Police, in all her pomp was a momentous occasion, a moment for the provincial service to feel close to the heart of the great machinery of the Vlast.
Chazia had dominated the room: a small woman but, standing on the simple stage at the front of the hall, a pillar of air and energy, pale and intense, neat and slender and upright, her voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the hall. She had drawn and held the attention of every man there. We are hers, they found themselves thinking. We are her soldiers. We are working for her.
The reports they provided mattered, that was Chazia’s message to them: they were used; they had to be done right. Lom listened intently as she unfolded the process by which raw intelligence from across the Dominions of the Vlast was gathered and sifted. It was a huge undertaking, rigorous, elegant, thorough: beautifully simple in its conception, dizzying in its scale and reach.
The Vlast’s information machine was in fact three machines, or rather it was a machine in three parts: that was how Chazia expounded it. First, there was the soft machine, the flesh machine, the machine of many humans. They were the Outer Agents: uniformed policemen, plain-clothes detectives, infiltrators and provocateurs – tens if not hundreds of thousands of them – watching and listening, collecting information about the political activities, opinions and social connections of the population. The Outer Agents used direct observation, and they also employed their own informants – dvorniks, tram drivers, schoolteachers, children. Their primary targets were the shifting and fissile groups of dissidents, separatists, anarchists, nationalists, democrats, nihilists, terrorists, insurgents and countless other dangerous sects and cults that sought to undermine the Vlast. Naturally they also collected an enormous amount of collateral intelligence on the families, neighbours and associates of such people, and on public servants and prominent citizens generally, for the purposes of cross-reference, elimination and potential future usefulness.
The soft machine fed the second machine, the paper machine: tons and tons of paper; miles of paper; paper stored in the dark cavernous stacks that ramified through the basements and inner recesses of the Lodka. Nothing was thrown away: nothing had ever been thrown away in the history of the centuries-long surveillance. The technicians of the paper machine were the archivists and code breakers and, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, the analysts. It was they who, working from summary observation sheets, prepared the semi-magical Circles of Contact. Finding cadres, plots and secret cells in the teeming mass of the population was harder than finding needles in haystacks. Circles of Contact was how you did it. You began by writing a name – the Subject – at the centre of a large sheet of paper and drawing a circle around it. Then you drew spokes radiating from the circle, and at the end of each spoke you put the name of one of the Subject’s contacts or associates. The more frequent or closer the contact, the thicker the connecting spoke. Each associated name then became the centre of its own circle, a new node in its own right, and the process was repeated. The idea was to find the patterns – connections – linked loops – that would crystallise out of seemingly inchoate lists of names and dates and demonstrate the presence of a tightly knit but secretive connection. Lom found it exhilarating. It was like focusing a microscope lens and seeing some tiny malignant creature swimming in a bath of fluid. This was why he had become a policeman. To understand the pattern, to find the alien cruelty at its heart, to cut it out.
And the third machine, Chazia had said, the heart and brain of