The Punch Escrow

by Tal Klein

  She stepped forward, trying to appeal to him. There had to be a remnant of her old mentor in there somewhere. “Bill, can’t you see we went too far? When you told me Joel was still in New York, it hit me: I had no idea which of my two husbands was real. I still don’t. We aren’t ready for this technology! No one should be in the business of selling resurrection.”

  “And what do you think our forefathers would say of the current state of medical technology, Sylvia?” His glare looked as though it might singe her with its intensity. “Life everlasting is already possible, but at a cost. We’ve genetically engineered near-immortality, yet we don’t seek designs on true immortality. We do not seek to defeat death, Sylvia; we merely choose the time and place of our dying. Our aspirations are too small.”

  Sylvia shook her head. “And when will it be enough, Bill? Say you do conquer death—what then? At some point, there has to be a limit. Some lines are there for a reason.”

  “You disappoint me. Had all scientists thought as you do, we would still think the Sun revolves around Earth.” Taraval grunted as he turned an old-fashioned hand crank. An antique touch screen emerged from the wall beside them. “For you see, when is the answer, not the question. You and I—we are in the wrong when.” Taraval placed his palm against the screen and the gate began to open, slowly scraping against the outside wall.

  Taraval grinned, pleased with himself. “Let us soldier on, Sylvia.” He gently nudged her forward. “The future awaits.”

  SUPERCALISOLIPSISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS

  JOEL2 AND I were utterly flabbergasted by Zaki’s sudden appearance in our car—and by flabbergasted, I mean scared shitless.

  Are they going to kill us both now? It would be elegant in its simplicity. Make it look like a man horribly replicated by a teleportation mishap gets into a car to find himself already inside. Violence ensues…. I can imagine the headline: “Bizarre Accident Yields Two Corpses of Same Man.”

  I dared to ask Moti, “So, this was part of your plan, too?”

  He shrugged. “Well, the medical device was an unfortunate touch. I didn’t expect to be shocked,” he said as Zaki took the belt off his wrists. “And I didn’t really want to be tied up.” He flexed his hands and smiled. “But mostly, yes. This is a Levantine car you ‘rented.’”

  The vehicle in question came to a stop again. The passenger-side door opened.

  “Look who it is,” Moti said.

  “Hi,” Ifrit said shyly as she sat on the other side of me. She was wearing the same cream pantsuit she’d had on earlier, with a bomber-style jacket over it now. Joel2 gaped at her arrival in disbelief.

  “She’s with them,” I whispered to Joel2.

  “No shit,” he whispered back. “How many of them are there? This is like a reverse clown car.”

  I shrugged.

  Ifrit leaned forward to Moti and began whispering in his ear. “No, no,” he said, “I want them to hear this. Tell them!”

  As the car began to drive again, Ifrit nodded nervously. She kept looking at Moti, avoiding eye contact with both myself and Joel2. “I received an update from Pema. She says Corina Shafer now for sure knows about Taraval taking Sylvia. She has suspended all TC operations in New York to stop him from leaving. They have also locked him out of their network.”

  “Did IT take our deal?”

  “What deal?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Ifrit ignored me. “She didn’t say.”

  “She didn’t say,” Moti echoed her words, tsk-tsking softly. “Ifrit, we don’t fall in love with our marks. You know what Pema’s fate will be if she doesn’t deliver. Why would you cause yourself so much pain if—”

  “I trust her,” Ifrit stated, defiant.

  “And I trust you. But understand that when you trust someone else, you put my trust on the same chain as theirs. Once a single link in the chain is broken, all the trust is gone.”

  The cool intensity of Moti’s demeanor made me feel uncomfortable for Ifrit.

  “I … will contact her again,” Ifrit said, sitting back and activating her comms.

  “What is she talking about?” demanded Joel2. “A way to locate Taraval and your wife,” Moti said briskly. “Now, Zaki, what else can you tell me that I do not already know?”

  “If IT really turned off all the TCs, then we can start to follow chits. William Taraval will need to buy something eventually.”

  “Chits?” Moti tsk-tsked again. “This is all we have to go on?”

  “For now.” Zaki nervously twirled the cigarette in his fingers, visibly racking his brain for a different idea.

  “Zaki!” Moti yelled. I couldn’t tell if it was a crack in his calm demeanor or just how Levantines spoke to one another. To me, it sounded like they were always on the edge of an argument, but from what I’d seen of Moti, his people usually interpreted his yelling as casual conversation. “Smoke the fucking cigarette or put it away; either way, stop fidgeting! I’m trying to think!”

  Fidgeting—the fidget problem!

  That crafty motherfucker. That’s it!

  The excitement I saw building in Joel2’s eyes assured me he’d reached the same epiphany I had. Twins.

  Our moment of levity irked Moti. “What?”

  Joel2 nodded at me. “You tell him.”

  “They’re porting via freight,” I said confidently. “Sylvia told me once that the freight TCs have completely different protocols. Can you guys spot Taraval or Sylvia if they log into a freight TC console?”

  “They can’t go freight. It’s suicide,” Moti said dismissively. “No one would be so stupid.”

  “William Taraval would,” Joel2 said before I could.

  NULL ROUTE

  A GENERATION AGO, Chelsea Piers had been one of New York City’s most popular destinations for water transportation. Once teleportation became the norm, very few businesses wanted to spend their time dealing with tides, storms, and seasickness to reach a destination. The only boats still in use were for hobbyists and competitive sailors. So the docks at Chelsea Piers had been purchased by IT and converted to a large-scale teleportation “shipping” yard. Several warehouses, stacks of containers, gantry cranes, and idling freight trucks populated the area. Each crane housed a console and a conductor to operate it, and was positioned over a concrete portal, which was basically a reinforced, container-sized hole three meters deep. There were twenty or so of these in the yard, interspersed several container lengths apart.

  Taraval led Sylvia to the nearest crane, then stuck a piece of heavy foil tape on her mouth and wrapped the same around her legs, making sure to bind her several times. “Assurance demands prudence, I’m afraid,” he told her by way of apology.

  As he sat her next to a metal container, a blaring alarm jolted them both. Blinking yellow lights spun on the crane arm. They watched as a shipping container was lowered into the portal and scanned, and then disappeared in a puff of dust as it was teleported.

  “Never gets old, does it?” said Taraval, then walked off and vanished behind the ladder that led to the crane’s operation booth. Three stories above, the conductor, a goateed man in workman’s overalls and a yellow hard hat, went out to check something on the crane’s catwalk. Sylvia yelled, trying to get his attention, but the din of the shipping yard and the metal tape on her mouth drowned her out. A tear of frustration rolled down her cheek as the conductor ambled back to his control console. Shortly thereafter, the magnetic crane began to move, lifting another container and guiding it toward the portal.

  Sylvia braced her feet against the ground, pushing herself to a standing position. She could now plainly see the conductor at his console, but his head was turned away. She hopped up and down, yelling as loudly as she could, trying to get into his line of sight. If he’d only look her way! She tipped over and fell to the ground, flopping and wiggling around like a fish out of water. It was embarrassing, but he actually glanced down in her direction. She increased her movements and screamed, feeling the strain on her vocal cords.
The conductor looked at her quizzically, his eyes going wide—

  Then he wasn’t looking at all; he was slumped over the railing. Taraval stood behind him, waving to Sylvia, a large wrench in his hand. She saw him wipe the bloody tool on the poor man’s overalls, and tasted vomit in her mouth.

  Her kidnapper stepped up to the console. He lowered the shipping container back to the earth, detached the magnet, then positioned it right above her. She heard the hum of the magnet as it turned on. Her feet, bound in metal-bearing tape, slowly rose to meet it. She tried pulling her legs free, but it felt as if she had been cast in concrete below the knee. Taraval raised the crane, dangling Sylvia upside down like a prize catch at a weigh-in. Blood rushed to her head as the distance between her and the hard cement below became ominously greater. She began to feel dizzy. Soon enough, the dead conductor appeared in her field of vision, Taraval standing behind him. He tapped the console, halting the magnet so that they were eye to eye, though on opposite ends of the vertical axis.

  He reached up and gently removed the tape from her mouth. It flew from his hands to the hook, drawn by its immense magnetic pull. He smiled at this.

  “Impressive, isn’t it? Simple, yet powerful.” He gently patted the crane. “Like teleportation. Our life’s work—it shall set us free.”

  Sylvia spit—out of disgust, and to clear her mouth. “Is this really your plan, Bill?” she asked. “You’re going to port us like a piece of furniture? This is an inorganic TC—without the right calculations, we’ll end up as heaps of flesh and bone on the other side. You may as well just drop me from here; I’ll have a better chance of surviving that than what you’re proposing!”

  “Flesh and bone. Sylvia, you have the poet’s flair. Your presence in the future is optional, my dear. I’m content to borrow your access privileges to Honeycomb, since Corina has so ungraciously locked me out. I simply have to enable your comms and the magic shall commence.”

  “And then what? They’ll just find you in the glacier, Bill.”

  He chuckled, as if indulging a child. “Is teleportation not the literal manifestation of God’s gift to mankind? A human disappears from his burial tomb, then appears somewhere else. Mary Magdalene can’t believe her eyes. Luke is dumbfounded, he thinks Jesus is a ghost, and so Jesus challenges him, ‘Look at My hands and My feet; it is I Myself. Touch Me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones.’” Taraval stared out at the rainy shipping yard, and the river beyond it. “Not quite the Garden Tomb outside Jerusalem, my dear, but one generally does not get to choose the site of their resurrection. They won’t find me until I reemerge. For that, I took a page out of the Gehinnomites’ book. When I researched this Pulsa D’nura, I discovered gematria. Ever hear of it?”

  Thanks to me and my love of trivia, she had. Gematria was an old Jewish system of assigning numerical value to letters and words, for the purposes of divining a thing’s “essential power.” “You’re going to encrypt yourself, Bill?” she asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Clever girl!” He laughed. “None shall find me until the day, many months or years hence, when I shall reappear, resurrected from the glacier. My very own Second Coming.”

  A BORROWED SWORD

  THE LEVANTINE SEDAN pulled to a stop outside the Central Park Zoo. A large black luxury van was parked out front. This being July Fourth, the zoo entrance was crowded with families and kids all wanting to see the animals.

  “Zaki, clipboard!” Moti yelled as he exited our car. Zaki followed, holding out the antique item as he made his way to their welcoming committee—a detachment of seven Levantine operatives who emerged from the back of the black van. They all wore tactical operations vests and had the faces of seasoned experts. Further evidence, as if we needed any, that Joel2 and I never really had Moti; he’d had us all along.

  I wondered just then how close we had come to death. If we hadn’t figured out what Moti was up to, would he have kept us alive?

  “Come, come,” Moti said, ushering us toward the van. Joel2 and I got out, walking to the nearly bus-sized transport. The inside was lined with at least a dozen seats against the walls, as well as a command center with plenty of consoles. Unlike the LAST Agency office where I had first met Moti, there was no attempt here to deceive any visitors. The van’s interior had all the trimmings one would expect of a high-end spy operation.

  Zaki handed Moti his clipboard, then quietly conferred with a stern-faced raven-haired woman at the command console. After they seemed to agree about whatever she’d told him, Zaki announced to the group, “A male and female matching William Taraval and Sylvia Byram were recorded near the Chelsea Piers freight TC.”

  “Time to departure?” Moti asked.

  “Five, ten minutes,” Zaki answered.

  “Make it five!” barked Moti. He took a drag of his cigarette and turned to us. “Good suggestion. Now you wait here and—God willing—we will return with your wife. In the meantime, you two have much to discuss.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “Are you seriously trying to feed us some variation of We’ll take it from here? You really think we’re going to stay here with the red pandas while you take out Taraval and try not to get our wife killed in the process?”

  “Nobody is killing anyone,” Moti said conclusively.

  “We’re coming,” said Joel2.

  “No.” Moti shook his head.

  “We are coming,” Joel2 reiterated. “In the past forty-eight hours, we’ve been killed, resurrected—”

  “Replicated,” I added.

  “Kidnapped,” Joel2 said.

  “Poisoned—”

  “And bludgeoned.”

  “We’re coming,” I stated.

  Moti took an impatient drag of his cigarette, then exhaled a plume of smoke in our direction.

  “Team, to me!” he shouted.

  Is that supposed to be a yes?

  Zaki, Ifrit, the raven-haired woman, and the other seven Levantine occupants of the van gathered around him. It was a credit to their training that not one of them did a double take at me or Joel2.

  “Our target, as you know, is a man named William Taraval,” he said, sending a dossier to their comms with a gesture. “If you have ever heard the term mad scientist, that is who we’re looking for. But make no mistake: mad or not, he is a very smart individual. He knows how to play the game, and if we find him, then we must assume it’s because he’s not hiding. Expect him to expect us. What we have to be careful of isn’t some weapon that he may be brandishing, but this man’s mind. His mind is his weapon. And speaking of weapons, use yours only as a last resort! Killing someone will not only end this mission; it will end our mission. We need this man alive. I don’t need a dead body: I want a live mind. Without his capture, we fail.”

  “What about Sylvia?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Joel2 said, “didn’t you just say—”

  “We leave in two,” Moti said, releasing his staff back to whatever they were doing. He eyeballed us. “Gentlemen. Have you ever considered the possibility that your wife played a bigger role in this than you would like to think?” This was phrased as a statement, not a question. “Do you wonder what else she’s been keeping from you? My wife thinks I’m a travel agent. What sort of business is your wife really in? Do you know? Because I am not willing to risk the lives of my people to find out.”

  No, I thought fiercely. I can’t be distracted by that kind of doubt. Joel2’s already sinking in that emotional quicksand; there’s nothing to gain by speculating about any bad shit Sylvia might have done right now. Right now we need to get her back.

  “You need us,” I said.

  “Why is that?” Moti asked, checking off boxes on his clipboard.

  “Because we’re unexpected,” I blurted, making it up as I went along. “I don’t have working comms, so Taraval can’t detect me. And,” I said, pointing my thumb at Joel2, “Taraval thinks that he’s still in Costa Rica, maybe even dead. He’ll never see us coming. And if he does, we�
�re the ultimate distraction. In his mind, we’re the entire reason he’s in this mess. We’re the reason his career and his science is at risk. We’re an affront to his ego.”

  Both Moti and Joel2 seemed impressed at my ad-libbed rationale.

  “Okay,” Moti relented. “But you’re both under my direction, right next to me the whole time. You don’t sneeze without my permission. Understood?” He looked at both of us, his gaze serious.

  We nodded in unison.

  He jerked his head toward the van. Joel2 and I climbed in after him, taking the first available seats. The rear doors closed and the van pulled out, heading west through Central Park.

  Moti went over to Ifrit and whispered something in her ear. She motioned to a compartment by the aft door. The ride started getting bumpy as we went off-road briefly to pass a slower-moving vehicle. Moti put his hand against the roof of the van to balance himself as he opened the compartment. He pulled out a couple of matching black T-shirts, pants, and tac vests.

  “Put these on,” he said, throwing one set to me and the other to Joel2.

  “You mean just drop trou and get naked in front of everyone?” I asked. “I am currently without underwear.”

  This amused Zaki. Through deep-throated laughter he quipped, “Then please, don’t spend too much time being naked!”

  “Why do we have to change?” Joel2 asked Moti.

  The spy stretched a hand toward Joel2’s face. He flinched and tried to dodge, but Moti caught the back of his head and ripped off the bandages covering both his temple and his right eye. “Because if he thinks one of you is dead, it’s better if you are both the same you,” he said, throwing the bloody dressings to the floor.

  Joel2 and I obliged. I wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but considering I’d spent the earlier part of the day running around with my ass hanging out of a hospital gown, the notion of a bunch of Levantine spies gawking at my junk didn’t move the embarrassment needle much. I was actually pleased to part with my dirty makeshift fake-doctor outfit in favor of some clean clothes. Also, the vest made me feel a bit like a badass.