The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn glanced at Neve, who gave her what might in a human woman be a self-satisfied smirk. In fact it was, but it was also justified and persuasive. Taryn looked at the cup she held between her slightly grubby bandaged hands, and the blackened blood blisters at the root of each tortured fingernail. Jane saw what Taryn was looking at and told her that the sidhe could have used mendings to help Taryn heal, but it wouldn’t have been polite, because she was Shift’s not theirs.

  ‘Can Shift make mendings?’ Taryn asked.

  ‘Shift can’t do anything with the iron in him. That is why he just wiped his dripping nose on his already snot-stiffened sleeve,’ Neve said, lightly contemptuous.

  Shift scrambled to his feet. He gathered the chains of the copper vessels in one hand, picked them up and said he’d go clean them. ‘With grit and elbow grease—my snot-stiffened sleeves rolled up.’

  As he walked away through the longhouse Neve made a bright-voiced remark in her own tongue to the assembly, and everyone but Jane laughed.

  Taryn muttered, ‘It’s like high school.’

  No one looked at her.

  Over the next hour the sidhe went off, several carrying bows on their shoulders. They were going to cull wild goats and sheep, Jane said. The carcass of any animal they killed would be left for the eagles and ravens, since sidhe ate no red meat.

  ‘Is it a religious restriction?’

  ‘They can’t digest it.’

  Jane helped Taryn up off her cushions and led her indoors. She helped her remove her clothes and unwind her bandages. She wrapped her in a soft wool robe, and gave her boots made of the pelts of long-haired goats. They looked like something an early seventies fashion model might have worn.

  They went out the end of the longhouse that backed on to the slope and climbed a path over a sharp ridge, then descended through a forest of the same twisted white trees that grew in a belt below Shift’s house. The path was a stepped boardwalk. Steam blew through the trees. That warmth must be what permitted the trees to flourish, since the springs were at a higher altitude than Shift’s gate, and above the usual treeline.

  The women emerged from the forest on the banks of the stream. It dropped, level to level, by smooth chutes of limestone, from pool to bubbling pool. In its higher reaches its channel was fringed with ice. But where the hot springs emerged, the clean limestone gave way to pools with lips of white crystal, smooth accretions of mineral that made each level as tranquil and sculpted as the infinity pool in a posh resort. There were many springs, the earth giving up its thermal water in more than one place.

  Jane and Taryn picked their way down steps beside the steam until they reached a pool of the right temperature. Jane removed Taryn’s boots and robe and handed her into the water. Taryn settled herself on a rock shelf and rested her head on a slick dent in the crystal lip.

  ‘I’ll leave you to soak,’ Jane said. She put the robe, boots and a rolled linen towel within Taryn’s reach. She unrolled the towel to show Taryn a copper bottle of water and a small silver bell. She shook the bell to demonstrate how its voice spiked through the burble of the stream. She assured Taryn that she would hear it. ‘Stay in as long as you can. Keep drinking and let loose your water. No one is above or below you.’

  Jane went off the way she’d come and Taryn closed her eyes and let her arms float. The weight lifted from her shoulders. Her lacerations smarted, then after a time stopped. Now and then she let herself lose contact with the seat and bobbed up to cool her shoulders. Her skin turned rosy, her scabs softened and yellowed. Sometimes the steam-soaked bushes dripped blood-warm water on her head.

  A small apricot-coloured bird came to bash a snail on the lip of the pool. It picked the meat—still whole and foaming with distress—from the crushed shell and dunked the shrinking, naked snail in the hot spring, held it underwater until it was tender, then gulped it down.

  Taryn closed her eyes and dozed. Her hair escaped and slid over her shoulders and spread out on the water, caressing her breasts.

  14

  The Pale Lady

  At Norwich Hospital, Jacob got as far as the nurses’ station of the orthopaedics ward. There he was told that Hemms was still in surgery, and he might like to wait in the family room. It had couches with grease-blackened cracks in their vinyl armrests, a coffee machine with an Out of Order sign, a stainless steel bench frosted with spilled sugar, a window overlooking the city’s skyline and, at that window, Raymond Price.

  Price’s grip was weak and cold, his hand a bundle of sticks in a bag of eel skin. ‘Jacob,’ he said. It seemed they were now on a first-name basis.

  Jacob said, ‘Do we know anything more about Rosemary’s accident?’

  ‘Local police are asking around. It isn’t a populous spot.’

  ‘Did she tell you I talked to Taryn Cornick?’

  Price looked amused. ‘That’s why I’m here. Rosemary phoned on her way up, before her accident, but after she’d spoken to you. She wasn’t able to tell me about the man who approached Ms Cornick outside the Bibliothèque Méjanes. But you can.’

  Jacob kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Ms Cornick, Claude Pujol, and a thickset individual appeared on security footage from the camera trained on the artwork at the front of the library.’

  Jacob supposed he’d been recorded too—leaping out of his rental car and rushing to save Taryn. ‘What did the camera show?’

  ‘The thickset man approaches Ms Cornick. She backs off, then spots Pujol at the door to the library. She waves at him. Then there’s fifty-one seconds of static.’ Price regarded Jacob, his expression as neutral as that of a person waiting for an elevator. ‘Has Ms Cornick mentioned the person who approached her?’

  ‘She wasn’t well, or talkative.’

  ‘You were there, Jacob, in the Renault you rented in Avignon. You abandoned it outside the Bibliothèque Méjanes.’

  Price had deduced Jacob’s presence from the Renault, so perhaps the static on the security footage started before Jacob leapt out of it. ‘I got to the library early, parked, then nodded off. I woke up when Taryn ran past. I followed her on foot, caught up, but she wasn’t making sense. She refused to go back to the library, and by the time I’d got her settled, and went back myself, the police were all over the place.’

  ‘Got her settled where?’

  ‘Her hotel,’ Jacob said. ‘When I returned they told me she’d gone out again, leaving her bags. I waited for her, but she didn’t come back. She called me yesterday, mid-morning.’

  ‘And you drove all the way to Soult Head to see her.’

  ‘She’s having some kind of crisis. Sooner or later she’ll break down and come clean about Timothy Webber. That’s what I’m waiting for.’

  Jacob took a seat. The couch huffed its sour breath at him. He said, ‘I don’t see how any of this helps you.’

  ‘I’m interested to see what you make of the footage,’ Price said.

  Jacob leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He held out his hand and waited for Price to pass him a phone. A phone with the footage. While waiting, he fell asleep.

  When Jacob woke the family room was hot, the sun glaring through its windows. Price was back again, still standing at the window, but dabbing his mouth with a paper napkin. He saw Jacob was awake and gestured at the bench, where there was a plastic packet of sushi rolls.

  The little bump the sushi gave Jacob’s blood sugar cleared his head and raised his mood.

  Price said, ‘Right, you’re coming with me.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Rosemary.’

  ‘I saw her while you were snoring in your corner. She told me I must take you in hand. Besides, you’re going to want to see this, since it concerns your main object of interest.’

  ‘Or you could just tell me.’

  ‘Seeing is believing, Jacob.’

  ‘You’re not talking about your footage, are you?’

  ‘We’ll get to that. This is even more interesting.’

  As they cruised out of t
he underground parking garage and passed his car, Jacob reflected on how he was always being denied the use of whatever kept him in touch. He had hurried to the hospital, concerned about Hemms. Also, he wanted her not to be any more aware than she already was of his unreliable absences. He hadn’t stopped to buy a phone to replace the one the raven destroyed.

  Price took note of the direction of Jacob’s gaze and said he’d send word for someone to return Jacob’s car to his place of work.

  As easy as that, Jacob thought, with real envy at the freedom and power Price enjoyed.

  The car’s engine was so quiet that he could hear the sticky sound made by Price’s fingers as his grip shifted on the steering wheel. After a time Price said, ‘Would you like me to tell you what the drone showed us in Skardu?’

  ‘If you’re at liberty to say.’

  Price gave a small huff of mirth, and Jacob thought for the first time—and far too late—Who exactly is this man?

  ‘Buildings without fences,’ Price began. ‘No gate, no checkpoint, no barrier arms. A partial barricade on three sides, made of thousand-watt base-load diesel generators, five to a row. A solar array on each of the larger permanent structures. Those buildings in an I-shaped configuration. All of them windowless, and painted a highly reflective grey. What else? Water tanks. Enough water to keep everyone comfortable.’

  ‘Would fifteen generators put out enough power to run the processors?’ Jacob asked.

  ‘Yes, but the compound is on the electrical grid. The generators are back-up, it’s to be presumed. However, taken altogether the generators and photovoltaic panels wouldn’t put out enough power to cover a cooling system in the event of a power cut. I don’t know if you know this, Jacob, but server farms are all about their cooling systems. It’s the energy outlay of keeping processors at an optimal running temperature that has big data companies building all their new server farms nearer the Arctic circle. Also—the compound isn’t pulling enough power off the grid to run a cooling system. So we know that they haven’t yet fired up their processors.’

  ‘Then the place is still under construction?’

  ‘Looks like it. No satellite array, or microwave tower, or cable.’

  ‘Maybe they’re just doing things arse backwards. Or maybe it’s not cyberterrorism. They have all that processing power but aren’t connected because it’s super-secret and they’re a games development company. That would explain their interest in Agile Media.’

  ‘We tend to see the lion as a maneater until we can examine the contents of its stomach,’ Price said. ‘We have shipping orders. We know they’ve completed their quota of processing hardware. We have manifests itemising post racks, perforated flooring, compressors, exhaust fans, all the peripheral arrangements of a cooling system. But no refrigerator units.’ Price cleared his throat. ‘Most of these people’s activities have been conducted quite openly. They have records that aren’t punishingly hard to obtain. They leave their bodies unburied, for Christ’s sake. They might be lax about concealment, but nonsense and obscurity seem to being doing a far better job of confounding us than the most clandestine of operations.’

  ‘Arse backward isn’t “nonsense”,’ Jacob said.

  ‘So you think we’re all over-reading things?’

  Jacob supressed a shrug. Shrugging might be construed as lack of interest. He waited for Price to tell him whatever it was—the thing they’d discovered that seemed odd and uncanny.

  But Price just looked at him, as unselfconscious as a predator peering through a parting in the grass.

  ‘Just tell me,’ Jacob said.

  ‘We had the drone make two passes. One at a lower altitude, with infrared. Every eye in our room was trained to some degree, and went at once to the blocks of heat, the generators, which were all in operation. The smaller buildings were softly green-blue, with blotches of orange showing the engine of an extractor fan. But the central building was blue-black.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘We jumped out of our skins. In Thames House. In Nevada, where the drone operator was.’

  ‘You’re going to have to help me.’

  ‘Why would a building that’s kept cold for the servers not be insulated?’ Price said.

  ‘It would be,’ said Jacob. ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You know what our technicians said? They said that the central building was too cold.’

  ‘So that building holds the refrigeration units. They must be piping chilled air through to the other buildings, where the processors are,’ Jacob proposed. He still couldn’t see the problem.

  Price said, ‘It was the blue that mapmakers give the Marianas Trench on nautical charts. The deep blue sea. A temperature outside the operational temperature of almost all electronics. As one of our technicians put it: “I guess NASA knows how to deal with those temperatures.”’

  ‘What?’ said Jacob.

  ‘To recap, the compound is running banks of servers that require a cooling system. How they are powering their cooling system is a mystery, since they’re not pulling the kind of power from the grid that could run industrial refrigeration. And there’s a building that is too cold. Colder than the temperature at which scientists store ice cores from Antarctica.’

  Jacob suggested liquid oxygen and Price said it had been discussed, and that the building would contain enough liquid oxygen for three Saturn rockets. Price then asked Jacob to reach into the back seat and have a look at what was in the document folder he’d find there.

  It was a report about the latest equipment sent to the server farm, including copies of shipping orders. Jacob scanned the pages then looked up at Price, who glanced at him with amused expectancy.

  Jacob turned another page. A moment later he understood what Price was waiting for. ‘Snow machines,’ he said, bemused.

  ‘A rather novel approach, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Don’t snow machines require refrigeration?’

  ‘We know they have refrigeration.’

  ‘You know it’s cold in the compound’s central building.’

  ‘Cold equals refrigeration,’ Price said. ‘You seem to want to make a lateral leap, Jacob. A leap with no landing place.’

  Jacob stared at the paper in his hand. Whisper Quiet Snow Machines, times ten. Thousands of gallons of evaporating snow fluid.

  ‘This is the sort of stuff used on film sets. Or in the theatre.’

  ‘Slava’s Snow Show,’ Price said.

  Jacob had a disconcerting image of the man holding hands with two pink-cheeked children on their way into a matinée of that clown’s icy extravaganza.

  Price continued, ‘Since you want to make a distinction between refrigeration and the building being cold, do you have any insights into the snow machines?’

  Jacob stalled. In a minute he might have to stop stalling and try flannelling. Flannelling was foreign to Jacob. How often had he watched with chilly patience as various criminals did it? ‘Snow guns on ski slopes only need a water supply,’ he said, ‘because ski slopes are already cold.’

  ‘Stop chewing it over and just read on,’ Price said. Then his phone burred and he took it out and glanced at it.

  Jacob continued to read.

  Bunk beds, bedding, towels. Big-screen televisions. Gaming consoles. Kitchen equipment. No sizable quantities of food yet, so the recruited coders hadn’t arrived. ‘These restaurant-grade fridges must be for their kitchen. They wouldn’t work for a film or theatre snow machine.’

  ‘Our current thinking is that the very cold room must be an uninsulated structure containing industrial refrigeration units,’ said Price. ‘A criminally inefficient cooling system. And somehow we missed their purchase, arrival, and installation. And we can’t see how they’re being powered. And no one has any useful thoughts about the highly fantastical snow machines.’

  ‘But hang on. You said the building was too cold.’

  ‘It is.’

  Was Price letting Jacob know that the Security Service’s cur
rent thinking was delusional? ‘I can’t make head or tail of this.’ Jacob said, trying to sound sincere, and not to think of scaly heads and pointed tails.

  ‘Perhaps the coders were recruited with promises like, “Come to Skardu for some low-headroom snowboarding.”’ Price made a little stagey flourish with his hands.

  ‘We have to stop somewhere,’ Jacob told Price. ‘I need a phone. I have a strong desire to find out the chemical composition of fluid snow.’

  ‘Hydrocarbonated surfactants, water and glycol,’ Price said. ‘Impossible to weaponise that.’

  Jacob read everything over again. He found himself memorising dates and quantities, as if that would help. When he finally put the papers away Price said, ‘Since you left the Palfreyman house, Ms Cornick has moved. Or has been moved. We’ve lost her for now, but have the vehicle she was travelling in.’

  Jacob’s heart jumped. He parted his lips in an effort to relax his jaw.

  ‘Palfreyman’s security contractors shut off the camera feeds at the Norfolk house,’ Price said. ‘But something else scrambled traffic cameras along roads from Norfolk to the Wye Valley.’ He picked up his phone, unlocked it, and passed it to Jacob. ‘That something else is very interesting to us,’ he said, then told Jacob to watch the video.

  The footage showed the street outside the Bibliothèque Méjanes, the spines of the statuesque French classics, the auto doors to the atrium. It also showed the roof of a dark blue Renault Koleos parked opposite those doors. A figure on a bicycle went by. Then a man carrying five trays of eggs. The slider measured twenty-six seconds of nothing, then a sudden thick flight of pigeons, birds and their shadows, black in the air and on the street.

  A figure appeared moving left to right. Someone who, like the man with the eggs, may well have walked past the gendarmerie moments earlier. The person was clumsy, rough, ugly. A shape like raw dough poured into men’s clothing.