Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  That does not mean it is not a powerful memory. This was where she felt his mouth on hers, with that glimpse into the rest of the house and the little coat room which he has given over to the dog. They slid down the wall together, her hand touching the bookshelf. Thoughtful books. Astronomy, she is surprised to find, rubbing shoulders with two volumes out of three on the history of colours. Black, and green. What does he have against blue? Perhaps blue is hard to find, or was never completed. Perhaps blue is a ghost book.

  She goes on into the house. Comfortable chairs, recreations of classic leather ones from the golden age of design. No Egg, no Eames, both of which she distrusts as off-the-peg expressions of historical cool. Walls in off-white, with plenty of painted art and no photography. Not cluttered, not like Hunter’s place. Filled, but with space for an additional life – or an additional person.

  She knows the owner is not here, of course. Kraken is tracking him for her, even making his journey just a little slower while she settles in and decides if this is really where she needs to be. If she can do this to him. If she trusts him.

  She wonders what he will say, how his face will look when she shares all this. Will he stand taller, or shorter, when she’s done?

  She goes up the stairs, stepping around the turn, where they made love for the second time. The landing has a little mezzanine study, tucked away beneath a round window. There’s a terminal, but it is unplugged. Beyond that is another door, logically the bedroom, because she can see the bathroom through the open one opposite.

  The sleeping space is sparse and clear, not dual-purposed but a place for sleeping – though not only that. It is presentable, and appropriately stocked with unopened playthings in a lower drawer. Intended for her? Or simply intended and never used?

  She does not lie down. She cannot afford to sleep. She does not want to look at the ceiling and know that her brain is slotting the image into the ones she already has of the two of them here, in his bed – padding the dream with offcuts of the real.

  Instead she sits, and waits for Jonathan Jones to come home.

  *

  ‘No, Ruby. No. I don’t think that was necessary. No. Well, I don’t. I see that you do, but I don’t. I think—No, I know he wasn’t—No. No, I don’t. All I know is that now we have absolutely to tidy up this mess and I see—Yes, it is our mess. Well, that’s bureaucracy for you.’

  Almost, it is the first time she has heard him speak. Even in what is evidently deep exasperation, he seems to wish for better things. An optimist, is Jonathan Jones – as every dog-owner must be, who lives in a white-walled house with beautiful things. She has seen no evidence of chewed finery, though, so either the creature is exceptionally well behaved or Jones has a zero-tolerance policy on broken things.

  She remembers him calling, with much the same edge of frayed patience she can hear now: ‘Brahe! Brahe! Get back here, you bloody fool!’ That drew her gaze to him, as to any man who names his Old English for a sixteenth-century astronomer with a prosthetic nose, and she wonders now if, in her scrutiny, she impinged upon his notice and triggered his query about her. It all depends on the direction of travel.

  Ruby. She checks automatically. Ruby Taylor. A work colleague. One of two presently on the call, the other being Chloe Williams. Jonathan Jones, Ruby Taylor and Chloe Williams. Why does that triad upset her? Why should it? The names are inoffensive, almost aggressively normal. She clamps an imaginary cigar between her teeth: It’s quiet – too quiet. She hesitates, then checks the Kraken help file. For a wonder, additional queries actually improve its obfuscation, adding random factors to its facades. Good, then. She groups the names, fires a query through Kraken into the network.

  @guest3455.6671.1643 – Chloe, Ruby and Jonathan are all among the ten most common given names in the database. this is not statistically significant. Williams, Jones and Taylor are similarly commonplace in the category of family names. the advent of a person having both is not statistically significant.

  Pattern recognition running overtime: hypervigilance, starting at shadows.

  @guest3455.6671.1643 [cont.] – the advent of three persons working in the same location possessing such combinational names is within the margin of error.

  Jones is in the sitting room, fixing himself a drink.

  ‘What does Chloe say? Did she know, or is she just catching up with it now? Ms Williams, you’re remarkably silent. I know better than to take that for agreement.’

  Why does it bother her? Chloe, Ruby, Jonathan. What’s the trouble with that? Plain, ordinary names. Solid names. Names that speak to reliability. Names that are not flash, that do not draw attention, that fade into the crowd. You could search and find thousands of them.

  She has run out of time. Stay or go? She can go down the stairs and into the street. He won’t have time to get up and stop her. He won’t even clearly see who she is. Kraken will fabricate a string of burglaries, maybe even cause one.

  But her feet, quite without her consent, have taken her like a lover to the landing and now down the stairs, and now into the room to stand in front of him, and the man she has never entirely met is staring up at her with his mouth open, robbed for a moment of speech.

  ‘Ruby, Chloe,’ he says, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m going to have to call you back.’ He does not wait for a response, but cuts the connection.

  Hah! Yes. Leave your work wives for me.

  She smiles at him and starts to say ‘Sorry’, but his face is transformed, as if he is looking at his god.

  ‘Jonathan Jones,’ he says, reaching up to shake her hand.

  ‘Mielikki Neith,’ she replies. ‘Inspector of the Witness.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She thinks for a moment he will pull her down on to his lap, but instead he tugs lightly on her hand and draws himself up. His body, lean and unfamiliar, mirrors her own at no distance at all. She can taste his breath. They are looking at one another’s faces, negotiating whose head will tilt in which direction for the kiss, and then she has grown tired of delay and just plants her mouth on his, driving her tongue between his lips and feeling his arms wrap and lift her slightly, bend her spine to complete the seal. They break off and go again, her hands climbing his spine beneath his shirt, finding muscle and hanging on. She feels his fingers cup her face, growls as they slide to the back of her head and then down to her shoulders and neck. Heat is growing in her, pent-up tension and stress and disappointment burning away in this new world that has Jonathan Jones in it, that has his skin and his fire. She draws back from him, clasps his face between her palms and stares at him, trusting that he will read this sign correctly as the announcement of mating, and returns to the kiss. The world goes red at the edges, then brown as she shuts her eyes and falls into him, and then coolly black. Sweet surrender.

  A part of her solves the puzzle just then – the business of the names, which are every bit as off-the-peg as ‘Oliver Smith’ – but he has closed the carotid arteries on both sides of her neck with his potter’s hands, and the distance to unconsciousness is very short.

  *

  The Inspector comes awake as the car stops outside a concrete and timber building whose upper floors are cantilevered on to the lower ones.

  In most cases, those waking from unconsciousness induced by strangulation do so with a surge of adrenalin and fight hormones. She certainly has done, in the past. It was something of a joke at Hoxton that the moment you really had to be scared of Mielikki on the practice mat was when you’d knocked her out. Today, though, she feels nothing but lassitude.

  She rubs her leg, feeling two puncture points like the bruises made by walking into the edge of a table. A drug, then: a sedative to keep her asleep for the duration of the drive, and an antagonist, to wake her. They do the same with fighter pilots in wartime. Over time, the combination makes them jittery and unfit for duty. She does not feel jittery at all. She feels fine. She just doesn’t want to argue.

  Jones opens the car door for he
r as if they were going on a date. She had been dismissing him in her mind, editing him out, but there’s no longer any denying that he exists. In so far as anything does, anyway.

  She lets him lead her into the foyer and past an unoccupied security desk, wondering as she does that a man or woman in a uniform was ever considered sufficient or even relevant to the task of keeping watch. The building must be old, to have a desk like that.

  ‘Lift’s kaput,’ he says. ‘We’ll have to walk up.’

  Thinking of the Real Life sign at her own building, and the stair carpet, she suggests that the mechanism may be worn out. Gone now, mind you: blown to smithereens.

  ‘Like Smith,’ she points out, fascinated. Jones favours her with a slightly perplexed look, then shrugs. ‘Swans,’ he replies finally, picking up his thought. ‘Nesting in the top. They’re protected.’

  The stairs are made of ground glass, milky green and opaque. Each step she takes produces a sound like sand on teeth.

  *

  They climb to the second floor and walk down a long, wide aisle between empty desks to a round meeting room. The Inspector finds this construction inherently offensive. It’s so obdurately wrong-headed to have a round room in the middle of a square building, especially having gone out of your way to make a point of the angles. She recognises it for deliberately created architectural dissonance, a critique of design as a concept made in the form of design – the kind of imbecilic caprice common in early-twenty-first-century spaces, as quaint and unwelcome now as narrow service stairs and low-ceilinged accommodations for servants. In one corner there’s what she thinks is probably an upright film-editing station: a trophy of the old media age, stuffed and mounted in here as a gesture of mastery. There’s a spotlight trained on the green metal casing to set off the period hammer-finish paint.

  Jones closes the door and sits down at the table. Each place is equipped with a soft pencil and paper, and a curious silvered sheet like a blotter made of oiled metal. Neith touches the nearest one, and finds it cold and slick, surprisingly heavy. She pictures herself heaving it at him, or wielding it like a stool in a bar fight, and decides against. Better just to use a heavy heel and her elbows: one, two, three and repeat as necessary. Of course: it’s tungsten, for writing notes that leave no history on the furniture.

  ‘Do please sit,’ Jones says, so she does. She’s still seeing his face caving in, hearing him crunch. Not normal for her, this avid contemplation of brutality. And likewise not this interior critique. Odd. Off and odd.

  ‘Where are the others?’ Her own voice sounds distorted.

  ‘They’ll be along. I thought you and I might discuss things before they arrive. There are very few good things happening today. I would like this to be one of them. I know that seems absurd and I realise that you came to me for help and I knocked you out, drugged and abducted you. I hope that shortly you will see that was the act of a friend, and that we will in time go back to where we were.’

  ‘I hope so too.’ It just pops out of her. Does she? Saying it has made her consider it. Well, yes: if positions were reversed and Jonathan Jones – her Jones, the dog-walker, not this new Jones with a secret conference room – if he were, for example, in danger of assassination by agents of an overseas criminal syndicate, she might take such steps to bring him to a safe haven. It is just possible he might provide her with a suitable explanation for his conduct. In that event, of course, she would review her sense of betrayal. She might even approve, and her approval might take a very definite and physical form, as it did in his house. If—

  What the actual fuck?

  Sedative hangover. Diminished inhibition. There is no such thing as a truth drug; there are only drugs that make you stupid. That’s why we have direct neural interrogation. We don’t want you stupid, we want you honest. Still, somewhere between scopolamine and MDMA is this place full of inappropriate lust and even more inappropriate credulity. Two punctures in her leg. Two drugs, one up and one down. Hardly a cocktail, but enough to be getting along with. Hunter beat such a combination. Hunter beat a far more directed and puissant one, by pretending she was someone else. A lot of someones.

  Hunter was prepared.

  And you are not?

  She has lived with Hunter these last days, has experienced the texture and text of her deceptions, the traces of Hunter’s own life in the mix: the combination of the narratives, viewed from a single angle, is a connectome image of Hunter’s mind sketched on the fabric of Neith’s own.

  Have you found her diaries?

  Yes. I suppose I have.

  Let us pretend, then, that we are a secret agent being interrogated by the enemy. Let us pretend that we must live on our wits, for these next few minutes, as if we were deep, deep under cover. We are Bacall – or better: we are Hedy Lamarr, who as well as being the most beautiful woman in Europe also developed a frequency-hopping guidance system for torpedoes. She sighs, and lets the thought go out of her on the exhale, like a prayer:

  Rebus, are you there?

  *

  Something happens. She cannot say what. It is not that the fog lifts, but it acquires a warm flavour of orange peel and anise. The gentlest of synaesthesia: truth drugs taste of hot cross buns. The spice twists in her mouth, quirks the lips as if around an enjoyable surprise. She is still not herself, but now that is freedom, not dismay.

  Making herself move as if she’s wearing a wide hat and a pencil skirt, Mielikki Neith turns and gives him the three-quarter profile. She doesn’t know how to do that thing with her mouth, that simultaneous hidden smile and sultry pout that conceals – and yet advertises – murderous intent. She thinks it, as hard as she can, hoping to make her body do it the way it’s supposed to be done: the look you can feel in your hip pocket. Think one thing. Think it and live it, and yet be another.

  Of three hundred students and twenty staff, by the end of the year I was the very best.

  Oh yes. We know how to do this, don’t we? Athenais knows. Poor Jonathan Jones, caught like Father Fishy on his hook.

  ‘So, Jack – does anyone call you Jack?’

  ‘No, they don’t.’

  ‘Just me, then. Jack.’ Lingering on the velar plosive ending the name. Is that too much? Lönnrot was good at this; Neith got beaten up. Jones looks as if he isn’t sure either. Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t this: a small tactical gain.

  I was the very best.

  She has no time to be anything other than the best, and no time to learn. Hunter had months to get there. Years. A life. Now she has to be better in as many seconds. She hits the half-smile again, and this time it lands. He flickers a grin back at her, one that comes up out of him from somewhere real, hastily suppressed. That makes her lips twitch, because she’s actually salivating, she can feel wolf’s teeth growing in her mouth. She will eat him, on the road to Grandma’s house. She stands up, making every bend and effort count, and puts both hands on the table and sets herself. She’s wearing last night’s T-shirt, but she makes herself feel the whalebone in a burlesque corset as clearly as the cold metal. Her body responds, adjusting to the constraint, stiffening her core. Her mood changes, sharper and starker. There’s the hardness of the tungsten under her fingers and the ball of her thumb – it’s called the mons veneris in palmistry, and wise lovers know to bite it with cautious intensity – and there’s the chilled blood running up inside her arms, and there – yes, there! Bring it on and bring it out – there is the restriction of each stay in the corset and the pleasant scratch of a misplaced fold of brocade along the curve of her right breast. She’s a hard-boiled woman in a hard-boiled speakeasy, got a gat in a violin case, got boys who’ll do bad things if she snaps her fingers. She’s a westerner with a Winchester and this is her saloon. She’s the sheriff in this town.

  What does Jones see? None of the above. He sees only the woman he has kidnapped looking at him in a way that does not suit the situation as he understands it. If he’s running the kinesic assistant, he’s being told she thinks she�
��s the boss of this moment. Her confidence implies that she knows something he does not. Even without Smith’s app, his mammal instinct is telling him her height puts her in a dominant position.

  Welcome to Burton. What your body knows is a matter of choice. School the meat; don’t let the meat school you.

  Did she make that up or remember it? How much of Hunter is unspooling in her now? Some Easter egg of identity that will engulf her? Or just enough to keep her from being swallowed by the shark?

  Yes. Kyriakos understands this. She can feel him looking over her shoulder. She guards her hands against the urge to scratch.

  ‘Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind?’ She knows one thing that’s on his mind. There was real desire in him, back at the house, and he made it into something else. He weaponised his own lust. He deceived her, but he cheated himself. The rest of the kiss is surely still in him, wanting to come out. Another tactical advantage: this conversation isn’t pure for him either. There are chemicals in his head, responses to her that have nothing to do with the job.

  She waits, then when he opens his mouth to speak, she affects to change her mind. ‘Stop. Stop, Jack, and let me think.’ The Fire Judges will have a narrative. That is what they do here: they build stories and use them to control tidal flow. She cannot beat the narrative they have in mind for her until she knows what it is, but if she waits to act until she knows, it will have swallowed her. She has to control this room, win the conceptual engagement and make of it a hinge to twist the giant’s hand against the joint. She must unbalance them at each turning of the road; she must be willing where they expect her to check, perverse where they imagine she will see sense. Act against type, but always according to self.

  ‘Five judges,’ she says. ‘Five minus one – Hunter – and two – Smith. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a Fire Judge. Is there a little medal on your watch chain? It doesn’t seem very you. Not very Jack.’ Bless the pharmaceutical company, bless the experimenting doctors, bless her own endocrine system for this benefice of strange abandon, and bless Diana Hunter, too, because without Athenais she would never dare, even now. She can feel the alchemist moving in her mind, a tool ready at hand.