Chapter Twenty-eight

I WAS SITTING in the uffizi’s staff canteen with the rest of the team, picking at a meal of espresso and more espresso, when the call came.

The director took it on his cellphone then turned to me, but spoke loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘There’s something on the film. ’

We ran down white, silent corridors, past a startled group of wealthy donors being given a behind-the-scenes tour, into a freight elevator and towards the conference room.

Through its glass wall we saw the technicians huddled round one of their two large computer screens, one of them at the keyboard while the water-cooled hard drives spun fast.

The director had kept up with me all the way. ‘Whatever they found on the silver nitrate will have been digitized and put on to disk. That’s what they’re looking at. ’

We sprinted through the doors. The image of two people – just two people standing in the room – was all I needed. Anything to identify the visitor would be a bonus.

There was nothing on the screen. Well, that wasn’t exactly true – there was a darkness of varying shades, like looking at a pond on a moonless night. The director must have seen the distress on my face.

‘Don’t panic – not yet, ’ he said. ‘They’ll use the software to force the image, then try to fill in the missing microscopic dots from the surrounding fragments. It’s the same method we use on damaged frescoes. ’

But I was panicking – he would have been too if he had known how much was really at stake. The young tech at the keyboard, his skin as white as the walls, was entering command after command. I looked at the intense, almost religious concentration on his face: he certainly hadn’t given up, and that was comforting.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first but gathering pace as the hard drives spun even faster, a shape emerged from the dark ocean. I could tell from the warning lights blinking amber on a series of controllers that they were pushing the system close to its limits, but those guys weren’t for turning either. I saw part of a room surface from the pond: fragments of a chandelier, the outline of windows looking out on to a view, the side of a fireplace. It was definitely the library in the French House, or La Salle d’Attente or whatever other damned name anybody wanted to call it. I could barely believe it.

‘I think we’ve got a person, ’ the pale technician said over the clapping. He pointed at a section of the pond water – darker than the rest but containing a shadowy outline – cordoned it within an electronic grid and poured in a constant barrage of light and pixels and there was the leather armchair – I could see it!

Hands sweating despite the constant and relentless air-conditioning, I could make out a blurred head, the crook of an arm, a part of the neck of a man in the chair. It was almost certainly Dodge. The techs kept going, the warning lights drummed out an even faster beat and the dark water surrounding the armchair sprang into sharper relief.

Dodge was alone.

Even so, the director and his team turned to me – elated, calling out in celebration. The plan which they had designed and implemented had been successful: they had recovered an image from an almost unheard-of medium. There was no doubt it was an outstanding achievement. Equally, there was no doubt it didn’t help me at all.

‘What’s wrong? ’ they asked as they saw my face.

‘I knew there was a man sitting in the chair. I’m looking for another person. I need two people. What about the second mirror? It’ll show the room from a different angle. ’

We turned: the pale guy and his colleague already had the second image on the screen. You didn’t need to be an expert in computer graphics to see it was far more degraded – the ocean of blackness was deeper and the available light thin and full of shadow. We might as well have been underwater.

The technicians moved faster. The darkness disappeared and the guy at the keyboard once again dragged fragments of the library out of the depths. Parts of the chair and table emerged, but their shapes were far less distinct and already the warning lights had hit the amber and a few of them were starting to blink red. My hopes nosedived.

The techs themselves looked disheartened, frequently glancing up to see more of the warning lights crossing over and yet achieving no real improvement in the image.

That was the trouble with luck, I figured – it runs out. I felt the director and other members of the team shoot glances at me, knowing how disappointed I must be, wondering how I was going to take it.

All the lights were red and I realized the techs had stopped trying to enhance the image – they had reached the limits of the technology. The half-formed image of the library hung on the screen like a quiet reminder of failure. The pale tech leaned closer to it, pointed at one section of the darkness and said something in Italian I didn’t understand. The director and the rest of the team peered at the spot he was indicating, but it was clear nobody could see anything.

The tech – not very confident because he was doubting his own eyesight – dropped a grid over the section. Ignoring the red lights, he zoomed in on it, manipulated the pixels and tried to coax the truth out of them.

Nothing.

His colleague stepped in and hit a command. The area under the grid inverted – the black becoming white, as if it were now a negative image. Suddenly we could all see something – a vertical shape almost out of frame. The two techs worked together fast, pushing the software and the hard drives beyond their operating limits. Warning boxes popped up, but the guys cancelled them out as soon as they appeared. The red lights weren’t flashing – they were a solid bar.

Still the guys kept going, but there didn’t appear to be any discernible improvement – a solid shape teasing us, that was all. Then they turned the image back from the negative and removed the grid and the zoom.

It was there! Indistinct, spectral-like, but the shape had become a person standing in front of the fireplace. It was impossible to distinguish anything specific – even if it was a man or a woman – but that didn’t matter. There were definitely two people in that room.

The director and his team stared at it for a moment then cheered, while the two technicians got to their feet and hugged their colleagues.

I pulled my eyes away from the screen, smiled, put my hands together and applauded them all: they didn’t know it, they would never know, but the Pathfinder was back in business.