“Then how come,” she tapped the side of her head, “he’s in here, speaking to me, right now?”
The furrow between Berg’s eyebrows grew deeper. Suspicious eyes searched her face.
“What you have to decide,” Victoria continued, “is whether I’m concussed and delusional, or whether I really do have an angry murder victim in my head, telling me what to do.” She pulled the quarterstaff from her pocket. “Either way, you’re in a whole lot of trouble.”
The Smiling Man drew back.
“You can’t hurt me.”
Victoria flicked the staff out to its full extent.
“Are you sure?”
She took a step closer. In her eye, Paul chewed the knuckle of his left index finger, his face a picture of grim expectation.
“Where do you want me to hit him first?” she asked.
Berg took another step back and stopped. The cargo doors were behind him. He had nowhere left to go.
The door controls hung on the wall to Victoria’s right. Green button to open, red to shut. Holding the staff in one hand, she reached out.
“Last chance,” she said. Her finger pressed the green button. The cargo doors gave a metallic groan and peeled apart, opening like the petals of a flower.
Berg stood silhouetted against the light. The Tereshkova’s engines were pushing it up and away from Heathrow’s cargo terminal. They were already at what must have been a thousand feet. Victoria saw hotels and roads sliding beneath them. Tiny cars.
“Now talk,” she called, raising her voice above the rush of the wind.
Berg looked down at the landscape passing below.
“I’m backed-up,” he said, with only the slightest trace of hesitation. “If I fall, my friends will find me. I will live again.”
Victoria brought the staff to bear, ready to give him a shove.
“Are you willing to bet your life on that? We’re a long way up, and I’m not sure your soul-catcher will survive an impact from this height.” She gave a theatrical shrug. “But if you’re so sure, you might as well jump, because unless you tell me what I want to know, it’s your only way out.”
She felt her heart banging in her chest. The words coming from her lips felt strange, as if they belonged to somebody a lot tougher than she was, and she drew strength from them. Berg’s heels were now inches from the edge of the deck, and she felt electrified. All it would take to kill him would be one strike from the end of her staff. One little push.
Their eyes met, and held.
Berg seemed to be trying to read her face, searching for any hint of a bluff. She glared at him, determined not to blink or look away.
Finally, after what seemed a small, eye-watering eternity, she saw something break in his posture. He looked back at the airport falling astern, and his shoulders fell. His chest seemed to sag in on itself.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BLOWING SMOKE RINGS AT THE STARS
DOCTOR NGUYEN LIVED in a detached house on the outskirts of Chartres, a cathedral town ninety kilometres south-west of Paris. Merovech parked the boxy old Citroën van on the opposite side of the street. He killed the ignition and the engine rattled away to silence.
“This is it.”
According to the clock on the dashboard, the time was eleven-thirty. The road was quiet. The cheery yellow glows in the windows of the whitewashed neighbouring houses spoke of home and hearth and family; but the lights were off in Nguyen’s place.
Merovech turned in his seat.
“Perhaps you should stay here,” he said.
From the back of the van, Ack-Ack Macaque regarded him with a baleful eye.
“That suits me fine.”
Merovech faced Julie.
“Are you coming?”
“Do you want me to?”
He looked across at the darkened house. The upstairs shutters were open but the curtains were drawn. No sign of life at all.
“I don’t know. Perhaps you’d better wait here.” He got out, breath steaming in the night air. Stars poked through clouds stained orange with reflected town light and, a few houses down, a dog barked in a yard.
“I won’t be long,” he said. He hurried across to the far kerb and up the short path to Nguyen’s front door, where he paused.
In his memory, Doctor Nguyen was a short, stern man in black hospital scrubs, with a stethoscope forever slung around his neck. If the documents he’d read were to be believed, Nguyen and his team had done things to him. Surgical things.
He felt his heart quicken. All those times he’d been given anaesthetic for routine operations — tonsils, appendix, wisdom teeth — they’d taken the opportunity to stuff more and more gelware into his head.
He raised his fist to pound the door. He didn’t care if Nguyen was asleep, he wanted answers. He wanted to haul the old buzzard out of bed and confront him; let him know how betrayed he felt. But, even as he pulled back his hand, he noticed that the door was ajar: resting against its frame, but not completely closed. The catch had not engaged. He could open it with a push.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The voice came from the side of the house. Merovech took a step back, fists raised.
“Who’s there?”
“A friend.”
A young girl stepped from behind the whitewashed wall of the house. She wore a fur-lined jacket several sizes too large for her skinny frame, a leather flying cap, and a pair of aviator goggles, which she’d pushed up onto her forehead.
“Prince Merovech, I presume?” Her accent was Scottish, which seemed incongruous here, in the sleeping suburbs of a small French town. “Is the monkey with you?”
“I’m here to see Doctor Nguyen.”
The girl gave a little shake of her head. She looked somehow familiar. “Nguyen’s dead. Murdered. I found him this morning, and I’ve been waiting for you ever since.”
“Who are you?”
The girl stepped back.
“I’m here to help.” She retrieved a sizeable holdall from behind the wall. “Now please, if you have the monkey, I need to see him.”
Merovech shrugged. He led her back across the road to the van and opened the back doors. Inside, Ack-Ack Macaque crouched against the back of the driver’s seat, fangs bared as if expecting trouble. When he saw the girl, he jerked upright and blinked his solitary eye.
“Morris?”
She touched two fingers to her brow in salute.
“What-ho, skipper.”
MEROVECH DROVE UNTIL he found a place where they could pull onto the verge in the shadow of some trees. Beyond the trees, ploughed fields stretched away to the horizon. He got out and walked a few metres down the road, his hands deep in the pockets of his red hoodie. Julie called after him but he ignored her. He needed a few moments to calm the turmoil in his head.
Forty-eight hours ago, his life had made sense. Now, almost nothing did. And he couldn’t go back. There was no reset button. He felt much as he had after the helicopter crash—dazed and numb, with this horrible, sick feeling that something huge and irreversible had happened to him. Something no amount of privilege or royalty could ever undo.
He looked up at the stars, trying to connect the dots, trying to find meaning in their random scatter. The air smelled of ploughed earth and damp, wet leaves.
When he turned to look back at the van, he saw Julie’s silhouette stood by the passenger door, arms folded, watching him.
Had it really been only three weeks since their first meeting, in Paris?
He’d been on his way back from a Norwegian bar in the business district, where he’d been enjoying an evening of akevitt and pickled herring with some of his classmates. He’d been there at the invitation of the proprietor, an ambitious young Norwegian politico. Norway had been part of the burgeoning United Kingdom since 1959, and its assimilation had encouraged the other Scandinavian nations to signup to the newly-formed European Commonwealth—the fi
rst step in a process that led eventually to the 1982 Gothenburg Treaty, and the implementation of the United European Commonwealth’s single market.
Merovech and his friends had all been half-drunk on the akevitt, and reeked of fish and onions. For fun, they’d dared themselves to take the Metro home from the restaurant. It was their idea of an adventure. Luckily, the train wasn’t crowded, and they found plenty of room to sit.
Obviously, Merovech’s presence caused something of a stir among the other passengers. Phone cameras clicked and whirred, but his bodyguard, Izolda, kept anyone from bothering him directly. She was a former Olympic wrestler, and had the kind of stare that could stop grown men in their tracks.
A purple-haired girl occupied the seat across the aisle, and Merovech thought he recognised her. Was she a fellow student? He was sure he’d seen her around the campus, but each time he tried to catch her eye, she looked away.
She’s gorgeous, he thought. But not in an obvious way. There was nothing self-conscious or artificial about her. She wasn’t dressed to impress anyone.
He watched her all the way to his stop.
When they pulled in and the doors opened, Izolda hustled him out onto the platform.
He glanced back at the girl, trying to fix her face in his memory, wanting to remember her in the morning. As he did so, she pressed her hand up against the window. She’d scrawled her mobile phone number across her palm in purple lipstick.
“Call me,” she mouthed.
The train started to move. He whipped out his SincPhone and, walking to keep pace with the window, punched her number into the keypad with his thumb. If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have used his phone to take a photo of the number. As it was, he got the last digit just as he reached the end of the platform.
The train pulled away from him, pushing itself into the tunnel, faster and faster. The wind of it ruffled his hair. He lifted the phone to his ear. She let it ring twice before she answered.
“Do you want to get a coffee?” she said.
WHEN MEROVECH GOT back to the van, the other three were standing in the pool of light cast by its headlamps. Morris had her holdall open and was rummaging through the contents. Ack-Ack Macaque now wore her fleece-lined jacket and aviator goggles, and puffed away on a huge cigar. The smoke smelled sticky and rank in the clear night air. As Merovech approached, they stopped talking and turned to him.
“Are you okay?” Julie looked concerned. Merovech walked over and gave her a hug. She was soft and reassuring in his arms, and he clung to her the way that in the South Atlantic, he’d clung to the ropes of the life raft.
“Thank you.”
For a moment, she seemed nonplussed. Then she put a hand to the back of his neck.
“De rien.”
He pulled back, holding her at arm’s length.
“I mean it. I’m sorry about what I said before. I know why you’re here. And believe me, I’m glad you are.”
He took her hand, and turned to face Morris and the scowling monkey.
“Okay,” he said to the girl, “let’s start with you.”
Mindy stopped rooting around in her holdall and rose to her feet. She wore a green v-neck sweater and skinny black jeans. Having given the oversized flying jacket to Ack-Ack Macaque, she seemed somehow smaller.
“I was just explaining to your friend that my real name’s not Morris, your royal highness. In real life, people call me K8.” She held out a hand. Merovech didn’t take it.
“Kate?”
“No, kay-eight. Letter kay followed by numeral eight.”
“Really?”
“It’s a gamer thing.”
“So, why introduce yourself as Mindy Morris?”
The girl looked at him, then glanced at Julie.
“He doesn’t know who you are,” Julie explained quietly. “He doesn’t play the game.”
Merovech looked between them.
“Ah!” He clicked his fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen you. You were in the clip, with him.” He pointed at Ack-Ack Macaque, who was now leaning against the van’s radiator, blowing smoke rings at the stars.
“That’s right.” K8 took her hand back and self-consciously used it to smooth down the front of her sweater. “I’m a professional game player.”
“But ‘Morris’?”
“I never use my real name. I play characters. Céleste Tech hired me to keep an eye on the big guy here.”
Merovech smiled despite himself.
“You’re his handler?”
Ack-Ack Macaque bristled.
“She’s my wingman.” He tapped ash from the end of his cigar. “Or rather, she was. In the game.”
“The programmers at Céleste were worried that he’d started to think about things too deeply. Started to question the world around him. The last time that happened, they had to get a whole new monkey.”
“Wait, he’s not the first Ack-Ack Macaque?”
K8 shook her head.
“Apparently, there have been five to date.” She glanced apologetically at Ack-Ack Macaque. “I didn’t find this out until after they hired me, but as each one went off the rails, they simply loaded the root personality into a new monkey, and the audience was none the wiser. They accepted it as an upgrade. Nobody outside Céleste knew it was a real monkey. They all thought it was an AI.”
“So, why bother hiring you?” Julie asked.
K8 grinned.
“I’m cheaper than a new monkey.”
Beyond the trees, Merovech saw the lights of a skyliner heading for the passenger terminal at Toussus-le-Noble Airport. Against the night sky, its gondola portholes shone like the windows of a floating village: warm and unreachably far away.
“How did you find us?”
The grin slid from the girl’s face.
“I heard about the raid. They called me and told me not to bother coming in to work. I thought at first it might be animal rights activists, but when I heard the rumour on the Internet that you were involved, your royal highness, I knew the two of you’d show up at Nguyen’s place sooner or later.”
“And you found him dead?”
“Yes. I saw him through the window. The top of his head was missing.” She rubbed her lips with the back of her hand.
“And you didn’t call the police?”
“I didn’t want to frighten you off.”
Still leaning against the Citroën’s grille, Ack-Ack Macaque rolled his cigar between finger and thumb. From where Merovech stood, he was a long-armed silhouette between the glare of the headlamps to either side.
“What happened to them?”
Merovech squinted against the light.
“Pardon?”
Ack-Ack Macaque pushed himself upright and took a step towards K8. His voice was low, barely a growl.
“The other four. The ones before me. What happened to them?”
K8 put her hands in her pockets. She took them out again. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them.
“They’re dead, skipper.”
“All four of them?”
“They were put down.”
Beside him, Merovech heard Julie Girard suck air through her teeth.
“Mais c’est du meutre ça!”
Ack-Ack Macaque glared at her.
“Murder? You can say that again, sweetheart.” With a flick of his hairy wrist, he sent the cigar flipping out onto the tarmac of the empty road. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
Merovech met his stare.
“What did you have in mind?”
Ack-Ack Macaque clawed at his hips, fingers curling around non-existent pistols.
“Kicking in doors, blowing up shit. The usual. Why, do you have a better idea?”
Merovech rubbed an itch on the tip of his nose.
“They’ve screwed us both over,” he said. “I’m just not sure the ‘all guns blazing’ approach is the best one, strategically speaking.”
“Fuck strategy.” Ack-Ack Macaque d
rew himself up to his full height. “Those motherfuckers at Céleste have killed me four times already, and enough is e-fucking-nough.”
K8 stepped up to Merovech. Her head came up to his collarbone.
“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “Don’t forget, I worked with Nguyen. I saw stuff. I know about you.” She tapped her temple. “I know all about the gelware they pumped into your head.”
Merovech looked down at her.
“I’ve read Nguyen’s notes,” he said stiffly. “I know I’m a clone.”
K8 gave a snort. “You’re a lot more than that, your highness. There’s more gelware in your head than anything else. You and the skipper here, you’re two of a kind.” She crossed her arms, looking up at him like the precocious kid she was. “The thing is, I’ll bet you haven’t figured out why the Duchess had you grown in the first place?”
Merovech restrained an impulse to seize her by the lapels.
“If you know something, tell me.”
The girl held his gaze for a couple of seconds, as if searching his eyes for something. Then she turned on her heel and began to pace back and forth in the light, talking as she went.
“Okay, here it is. I told you, I’m a professional game player. Some people would call that a fancy name for a hacker. And in my case, they’d be right.” She walked back to her holdall, where it lay on the grass. The van lights caught the steam of her breath in the cold night air.
“I was thirteen years old when I cracked the firewall at Céleste Tech. Six months later, they offered me a job, and I’ve been working for them ever since.
“When they called me in to look after the monkey, I got suspicious. I knew it wasn’t a real AI. So, I did some digging. I found Nguyen’s notes. He ran both projects, and he kept pretty detailed records.” She knelt and pulled a SincPad from the bag. “Here, I downloaded it all onto this. If you want to go public, this is all the evidence you’ll need.”
She handed Merovech the pad and stepped back, to the edge of the circle of light.
“Nguyen and your mother. They’ve been working on this for a long time.”
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