The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 3
A Name No One Should Know
Mira brought Petra’s recordings back to her office — a place that smelled of machine oil and old carpet and was separated from the building’s main corridor by a door that most people in the building had never tried to open. She ran the forty hours of transmission through a spectral decoder that was older than most of her colleagues and more reliable than all of them.
What came back, after six hours of processing, was a sequence of encoded identifiers. She recognized the encoding immediately: it was a variant of a protocol used in the 1980s by certain government agencies for secure inter-agency communication. Modified, clearly. Sophisticated. But recognizable to anyone who had spent three years of their career, as Mira had, cataloguing legacy broadcast infrastructure in the national archives.
The identifiers resolved to names.
She counted eight names in total. Seven of them were strangers. The eighth was her own.
Mira sat back in her chair and stared at the monitor for a long time. Her name appeared not once but eleven times, distributed across the forty hours of transmission at irregular intervals, interspersed between technical strings she hadn’t yet decoded. The version of her name used was not the name on her office door or her government ID — it was her maiden name, Mira Kohout, which she had not used professionally or personally in fourteen years.
She called Petra. “Tell me exactly what you know about Casimir Lund’s work before he retired.”
A pause, the sound of a chair adjusting. “He was a transmission engineer. He oversaw broadcast infrastructure for the national authority — towers, relays, frequency allocation. But in his last five years before retirement, he transferred to a different unit. A very small unit. I only know about it because he mentioned it once, at a staff farewell, and immediately seemed to regret having said anything.” Another pause. “He called it the Quiet Office.”
“The Quiet Office,” Mira repeated.
“I looked into it afterward. There’s no record of any such department in any public register. No budget line. No personnel file accessible through the normal channels.” Petra’s voice was careful, measured. “I asked Casimir about it, privately, a few weeks later. He was not unkind about it, but he made it very clear that the conversation would not continue.”
“Did he seem frightened?”
“He seemed,” Petra said slowly, “like a man who had decided that being frightened was a luxury he could no longer afford.”
Mira told her about the names in the signal. She did not, yet, tell her about her own name appearing eleven times. Old instincts. She had learned, in her years of handling signals intelligence — even the mundane, administrative kind — that information shared too quickly became information you could no longer control.
She stayed at the office until midnight. When she finally left, she walked home instead of taking the tram, and she chose different streets than usual, and she kept her eyes moving. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. She only knew, with the bone-certain certainty that had served her well in a career of invisible details, that whatever Casimir Lund had set in motion before his death, it had already begun to include her.