I couldn’t make proper sense of it. My head ached, a serious, pounding throb that I was surprised I couldn’t see in a mirror. Plus I was drinking hard, because I suspected that what I was going to ask Woodley to do—if he ever arrived—was going to hurt.
They’d come looking for me, and instead they got Helena. In the last few moments on the plane I knew for sure that I’d answered the question I’d asked myself so many times. It was Helena or nothing. I’d had my shot significant other-wise, and I now had a simple choice. I either gave up dating altogether, or I went back and tried to get back what I’d got, if any of it was still there to save.
On the fifteenth of March, 2014, as you might have gathered, I was involved in the armed robbery of a Los Angeles bank. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before. I was talked into it by an acquaintance of ours called Ricardo Pechryn, whom Helena had met through some mob-related business or other. He was flamboyant, good-looking and charismatic: one of those guys who was always either going to make it big or wind up in little pieces. Ricardo had inside knowledge of this bank, and knew that on that particular day it was doing to have a lot of money in the form of ‘eds’—extremely high denomination virtual bonds—which are so portable that you can off-load them overseas at up to fifty cents on the dollar. He could also, he said, rely upon his contact to disable the alarm system long enough for us to grab the money and get away.
I didn’t like the idea. It wasn’t my kind of thing. Charging in and grabbing money felt too Wild West and atavistic: anyone with any skill was doing their thieving on the Net, from the safety of another country. But in the end I agreed.
‘What?’ you may be shouting. ‘Are you fucking insane?’
In a way I was. I wanted out. Though I was keeping Helena from seeing it, I couldn’t stand the way our life was any more. I didn’t like what she did, but mainly I couldn’t stand being in thrall to people whom I hated, and who I knew would drop us at a moment’s notice if it suited them. If Helena made one slip-up, left a single clue which connected her to one of the hits, that was it. She would then be a potential lever on the mob to the police, and she’d be killed instantly—with me taken along for the ride. Helena was good at her job, but nobody’s perfect, and sooner or later it would happen. But still we carried on, shaking people’s hands and turning up to the restaurant parties, going through the ludicrous rituals of fake courteousness that overlie murderous pragmatism. You have to know who’s made and who’s not, and treat everyone with exactly the right amount of servility or lack of it. You get sent presents, on the understanding you’re going to send ones back, knowing each one’s going to be monitored to make sure it shows the right amount of respect. I’ve known people lose an eye for getting it wrong, and frankly that’s a little too much pressure for me when I’m standing in a crowded store on Christmas Eve. I guess it’s not that different from working for any other major corporation, except that the dress code’s stricter and the trade is in drugs and money and death. You join the company like you join a congregation, and after that your life is theirs.
And if you’re me, you do all this knowing that as far as everyone else is concerned your wife is the swinging dick of the family, and you’re merely some kind of hanger-on whose chief skill in life is making potato salad. They slung me scraps, little pieces of work, just to make sure I was on the leash. I took them. I had to. Like I said, it’s not an arrangement you walk away from lightly. But I started skipping as many social events as I could, letting Helena go by herself. She was sad, for a while, but then she didn’t seem to mind so much. So long as she was involved with the Life, she could forget the one she used to have, and sometimes I was far from sure which life I was a part of.
It was turning our lives, and LA, into a place I couldn’t be any longer. That was the worst thing. I loved LA. It was my place, our place: and now all I could see was a mesh of balanced loyalties, a grid of places I’d perpetrated crimes I hadn’t wanted to commit. It was like watching the Cresota Beach changing room dismantled, brick by brick, by people who’d never been inside.
I wanted out, and for that I needed money.
Ricardo knew some of this, and he pitched Transvirtual to me first. He said he needed two people with him in the bank, and he trusted us. An easy job, in and out, and then a three-way split. I said I’d think about it, assuming I was going to say no.
Then Helena asked me about it. Ricardo had gone to her separately and she was hot to trot. Soon I started to get the impression that if I wasn’t willing to play, if Helena’s wimp husband wanted to stay at home, maybe they’d find somebody else. That plus the need to get out sealed it. I said yes.
I still find it genuinely difficult to think about the day itself. It happened very fast, and I was very frightened. We got inside and made all the customers lie on the floor, and the alarm didn’t go off. I covered the floor, the big guy supposed to put the fear of God into the customers, while Ricardo and Helena loaded the bonds into bags. It all seemed to be holding. It was all going fine, and though I was wearing a mask I was trying to use my eyes to communicate that fact to the people nearest me. Just lie still and shut the fuck up, and everything will be okay. Nobody wants any death here, least of all me. As Helena switched from one bag to the next she gave me a wink, and for one moment I had a sudden, taut glimpse of unexpected success, like turning into the final straight of a race with only one man in front and realizing you’ve got something extra left in your legs.
Then Ricardo started shooting.
When the first crack rang out I nearly shit myself, assuming that security or the cops had turned up. Then I saw a red mess around the shoulders of the woman lying closest to Ricardo, and my entire body went cold. Helena, who was still grabbing money, turned and stared, hands still.
A man lying by the far wall screamed, and Ricardo whirled round and shot him too, like a guy picking a tin can off a log.
I abruptly decided that the job had gone wrong enough, and that Helena and I were out of there. I shouted to her, and Ricardo turned on me. The first shot hit me in the shoulder, crunching me into the wall. He came striding my way then, waving his gun and screaming—and shot again. I barely felt it, because my mind was taken up watching Helena. She was frozen in place.
Turns out she’d been screwing Ricardo. Ricardo explained both this and his disinclination to give me my third of the money, using all of our names, which is how witnesses were able to make us quite so conclusively for the job. He may have been handsome and equipped with a big dick, but Ricardo wasn’t exactly bright.
He could shoot though: the third one got me square in the chest, even though I was trying to crawl backwards out of the way. And maybe I wasn’t in line for any kind of Smartness Award either: because why would Ricardo have suggested a three-way split, when he could have offered a husband and wife fifty-fifty, unless he liked his chances of having access to two thirds?
With some kind of group mind, the bank customers realized that the bad guys weren’t friends any more and that all bets were off. Staying on the floor didn’t seem like quite so good an option in the circumstances. Ricardo started firing into the resulting mêlée; Helena just stood, mouth open, realizing her world had exploded in her face, for once in her life drained of all ability to act. I might even have felt sorry for her but I had problems of my own. I scrabbled onto my hands and knees, blood spilling all over the place, and tried to head towards the door. I don’t think I would have made it, except one of the customers helped me. Can you believe that? Middle-aged guy, red-faced, looked like a construction worker. I was reeling all over the place, sliding in my own blood, and he just grabbed my elbow and dragged me with him. He knew I was hurt, and he helped me.
The last thing I saw before I tumbled out of the door was Helena screaming at Ricardo, her gun pointed at his head. I guess he got out somehow, because it was Ricardo who was killed in the car bomb later that evening. He’d ripped the plan for the job off a made guy, before torturing and killing him. Like I said, h
e was phenomenally stupid. Helena must have somehow squared things with regard to herself and me, because we didn’t get whacked. I suppose I owe her that.
We were due to see Deck for a drink that evening. For some reason Helena still turned up. I was coughing up blood in a motel, having bullets dug out of me by Woodley’s remotes. In the background the news was telling me how many people were dead, how young some of them were. As I stared at their photographs on the screen, light-headed with shock and smack, I saw I’d got my wish. I had no choice but to get a new life. It just wasn’t going to be quite what I’d hoped for, and I would be living it alone.
At that moment I was suddenly jerked out of the past by the sound of someone knocking heavily on Deck’s front door. Woodley had finally arrived, just as I was thinking of him. My last coincidence, just as trivial as the other two. I made a note to try to get my money back from Vent, then remembered I wasn’t going to need much finance in prison. I got up unsteadily, went over and pulled the chair from under the handle. It swung open slowly.
Standing there, looking very confused, was Deck.
‘What the fuck has happened to my door?’
It was a manly hug, but it was tight and lasted a while. Eventually Deck disengaged himself. He looked spacey, his eyes a little red, and he had the air of someone who was watching the world with great care, in case it tried to screw him around.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I just found myself walking down the Boulevard, with no recollection how I got there. Last thing I remember, in fact, is Laura wigging out on the sofa and then trying to beat you up. Something weird has happened in my apartment, and I assume it probably involved me. Am I right?’
Pretty good summary, I thought. ‘Yes.’
‘How long have I been away?’
‘Little over twenty-four hours.’
‘We take a lot of drugs or something?’
I laughed. ‘No.’
‘Well Hap, you’ll always be the commissar of strangeness to me, so how about you explain what happened.’
It took half an hour. Deck absorbed it quite well: I’m not sure what it would take to knock him off balance. If you told him a table in front of him had just ceased to exist, all he’d do is take his drink off it, just in case. When I mentioned the glimpses of verdigris-coloured walls I’d had, he frowned a little, as if that tickled something in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t find it. He didn’t remember what he might have talked with Laura about, who else had been there, or anything else about the other place.
‘So there’s no sign of Laura?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘And now they’ve got Helena too.’
He blinked at me. ‘You’ve been hanging with Helena?’
I nodded, expecting him to be disapproving.
‘Cool,’ he said, closing his eyes tightly for a moment, as if they were hurting a little. ‘She was the one.’
Which made me wonder, if everyone else knew that, why it had taken me so long to work it out. ‘And may be again,’ I said. ‘If we can get her back.’
Deck looked around his living room for a moment, as if profoundly glad to be home. Then he nodded. ‘Any sign of a plan yet?’ There was a knock at the door.
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘And here comes part one.’
I opened it and Woodley walked in, looking like an old and cantankerous scarecrow. Deck raised an eyebrow.
‘Any plan featuring this old twonk strikes me as in need of immediate revision.’
‘And a good evening to you too, young fellow,’ Woodley retorted. ‘I say good evening, though it is of course the small of the night, as tends to be the case with you two disreputable hounds. Now.’ He peered hard at both of us. ‘What do you want? You both look in perfectly good health, given the nature of your so-called lives.’
‘Do Deck first,’ I said.
‘Say what?’ Deck asked. ‘And do what to my what, exactly?’
‘Yours will be far more recent,’ I said. I got him to sit backwards on the edge of the sofa, and pointed at the back of his neck. ‘I think it’s going to be there somewhere.’
‘What on earth are you talking about, dear boy?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Some guys have got a way of finding me, wherever the hell I am. They came for me in a plane and got a friend of mine instead—and at that moment her head was lying on my shoulder up against the neck. What I want you to do is take a look for any sign of something artificial in Deck’s body, around that area.’
The old guy opened his bag. ‘How long ago would it have been introduced into the body?’
‘Within the last twenty-four hours.’
He waved a piece of equipment at me. ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult. This will show up any cell trauma, no matter how small. All right then young man, hold still. This won’t hurt.’
Deck looked up at me dubiously, but bent his head forward. Woodley fiddled with some dials on the unit, which was about three inches square with an LCD panel, and then ran it smoothly over the skin. He had to move it back and forth for several minutes before something appeared on the screen.
A tiny green dot. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know yet,’ he said, then tapped a button. ‘Ah. It’s a very small square of some indeterminate material, purpose unknown.’
‘This your specialist subject?’ muttered Deck.
‘It’s lying half a centimetre under the epidermal layer,’ Woodley continued, ‘wedged in muscle. The cell trauma reading is very low. Are you sure this hasn’t been here a good deal longer?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now: can you get it out?’
‘Certainly,’ the old coot replied, and let his remotes out of the bag. They loitered uncertainly, not scenting any blood to point them in the right direction. I picked them up and perched them on Deck’s shoulder.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he asked. Woodley meanwhile retreated into the kitchen with his monitor and gloves.
‘This is how they’re tracking us down,’ I said quietly. ‘They had me tagged from years ago, and now they’ve got you too. We take them out, they don’t know where we are.’
‘What makes you think they still care?’
‘They’ve got unfinished business.’
Deck sighed. ‘Weird week I’m having.’
‘Okay,’ Woodley called from the kitchen. ‘Now hold still. Oh—and this probably will hurt.’
One of the remotes extended a feeler towards a spot on Deck’s neck, and sprayed it with a fine film of liquid—presumably local anaesthetic. The other extruded a tiny scalpel blade from a forward leg, and made a tiny incision. Deck flinched, but only a little. I would have flinched enough to send the remote into orbit. I decided I didn’t want to watch especially closely.
I turned back round when I heard Woodley mutter ‘Got it’ from the kitchen. One of the remotes was busily swabbing up the small amount of blood, and spraying a different liquid on the tiny access wound. The other was already holding something up triumphantly in its claw. I tried to take it from him, but scalpels immediately appeared from all of its other legs.
‘Give it to me,’ I said. The remote shook its tiny head.
‘If you’re going to have a fight with that thing,’ Deck observed calmly, ‘could it be somewhere other than on my neck?’
‘Woodley—make it give it to me.’ Woodley did something on his keyboard, and the scalpels slowly retracted—the remote making it clear that it had its eye on me and I’d better watch myself. I held out my hand and it dropped the implant into it.
It was about three millimetres square. One side was silver, the other a metallic aquamarine. It was almost two-dimensionally thin: when I turned it, it seemed to disappear, only the coolness of its surface telling me it was still there between my fingers.
‘Seen one of those before,’ the old man announced after a bit, in an odd voice. ‘Many years ago. Found it when I was digging shrapnel out of some poor boy’s head. Thought I put it in the tray with the shell casings, but
when I looked later it was gone. Enemy technology, is it?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘Wish I’d known,’ he mused. ‘I could have sold it.’
I found a small box on Deck’s table, and placed the implant carefully inside. Then I took my jacket off and sat down. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Now mine.’
Woodley ran the machine over the back of my neck. He fiddled with it for a while, and ran it over again. ‘Can’t seem to find it,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’ve got one?’
‘I know I have.’
‘There’s no sign of cell trauma anywhere in the area, apart from a small amount of bruising which I assume is symptomatic of your general lifestyle.’
‘It will have been there a while,’ I said.
‘Even so…’
‘A very long while.’
Woodley made harumphing noises, implying he was either thinking or had a filing cabinet stuck in his throat, then he turned and scrabbled in his bag. He brought out another machine, opened the box where I’d stowed the implant, and held the device over it. I watched tiny lights flash on and off: ‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting a pattern analysis of this little devil’s constituent elements,’ he said. ‘If it’s sufficiently distinctive, I might be able to scan for them in your neck.’
‘Good thinking, wizened one,’ Deck said. ‘Hap, maybe your plan wasn’t so dumb after all.’
Apparently satisfied with what his machine was telling him, Woodley made some adjustments to the trauma scanner and then ran it over my neck and shoulders again.
‘Ah ha,’ he said eventually. Then: ‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘I have a reading of similar compounds. At some stage you have had a similar device implanted into your body.’
‘Cool. Hack it out.’
He pursed his lips. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid. It’s been assimilated—or rather, I suspect it has assimilated itself.’
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