‘No, I haven’t seen Bethany today,’ he said. His eyes gleamed behind little crinkles at the corners. There was a faint pink line on his neck. High blood pressure. ‘I was just speaking with Liam, actually. Are you concerned about her?’
The way he said it was odd. He had such a rigid head, I couldn’t get inside his emotional patterns.
‘It’s very clear to me, Ms Jones, that you are working in concert with Dr Sorle, who is a murderer and, in all probability, a fraudster. So let me come clean with you. I work for the oil company that Mr Stevens skimmed for decades. It’s my job to find the money he stole and recover it for my company. As soon as my team found out about the home invasion in Amagansett and the subsequent event over Iceland, we started checking biometric data on passengers and crew. So imagine my surprise when you – supposedly dead – tried to take out cash in Viana do Castelo, where I just happened to be at the time because I was on my way to an offshore rig.’
‘This is supposed to explain why you were creeping around me?’
He laughed. ‘Creeping? That’s not a very nice word.’
‘You didn’t talk to me openly. You sneaked around spying on me. And now you’re following me.’
‘No, you’re following me. I let you go because we had another lead on the whereabouts of Dr Sorle. That’s how I got here to Edinburgh ahead of you, so, sort of by definition, I can’t be following you. I’m not really interested in you unless you do something to make me interested. Right now, you’re making me interested. If you annoy me, I will take appropriate action.’
Up in HD my feathers stood up a little. An auto-shop smell crept up from my own skin, like I was oozing metal and grease.
‘If you had such a great lead on Dr Sorle’s whereabouts, what are you doing following me?’ I said. ‘You know what I think? I think you poisoned Bethany. Maybe you’re trying to hold something over Liam, something to do with this money.’
He laughed, then rubbed Leonard up and down the ribs so that the dog’s skin moved into wrinkles over his muscles. Leonard licked his face in return. I still couldn’t get any read off what he was really thinking or feeling. This is frustrating for someone like me.
‘I don’t think you heard what I said. If you get in my way, I will take appropriate action.’
By this point I’d realised I would make a terrible TV detective, but I was already in the conversation up to my elbows. I’d been relying on my ability to sense what is going on in people’s emotions and to pick up fragments of their visual imagery in order to maintain control of an interaction. I couldn’t do that with Two Phones. He had probably been trained to control his reactions, and he seemed to know I was bluffing my way through this. I felt my confidence slipping.
He stood up and dusted off his chinos. Both of his phones were vibrating.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ I whispered.
He shook his head.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Go back to your car.’
I went back to Bethany’s car with the dogs, and I drove back to the house with my eye on the rear-view mirror, but there was no sign of him. While I was driving I got a call from Liam.
‘Listen, I hate to ask, but is there any chance you could look after the dogs just until tomorrow? Beth had to go out of town. Our usual dog-walker can take over, so they just need to be let out tonight and so forth.’
‘She had to go out of town.’ I loaded my voice with irony.
‘Yes. Can you? If not, I’ll start making calls.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ I said. Now I was starting to think they were in it together, Liam and Two Phones.
I had shut the library door so the dogs wouldn’t molest the corpse of the giant frog; now I put on gloves and transferred the whole thing to a series of plastic bags. I put it in the freezer.
OK. So it’s like a game of Clue. A locked room mystery. I needed the security footage. All I knew was that Bethany had been here and had left her bag behind. The door had been left open, or someone had a key. Someone had come in. There had been a struggle, or the appearance of one. A giant frog had been introduced to the scene (unless it was already there – but no sign of a giant frog habitat or giant frog kibble in the larder). Teacake the cat had been poisoned.
I considered what I knew about poisonous frogs. Most contemporary species came from South America and all were tiny. The only record I could find of a giant frog referred to a prehistoric example.
OK. Let’s just leave that there, shall we? Because reasons.
Then I started checking on Stevens and Dr Sorle. Stevens had worked for the oil company beginning in the 1970s as an engineer and rising to senior management. During this time he had spent significant time in Cameroon and Ghana as well as Kuè, where he was director of operations, and he’d later had executive roles in Aberdeen and Rio. He had retired after the turn of the century, founding a financial services company that catered to international executives like himself. He had been investigated four times by the IRS on tax evasion but nothing ever stuck. He had four ex-wives and ten children scattered across continents. Two of the children were involved in his business. He was considered a philanthropist and had given large sums of money to research on life-extension technologies.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said to the fish tank in the kitchen. I fed the fish and then I found my way around the password in the security system.
There were multiple cameras, and it took me a while to find the beginning of the incident. The last shots of Liam in the house had been taken the day the news broke about the disappearance of Austen Stevens. He was carrying a garment bag and a laptop case when he left. It was clear that Bethany had been here alone with the animals just this morning. Only hours before I’d arrived.
I watched Bethany let Kisi Sorle in. He was carrying the briefcase in both hands. I paused the recording more than once when it seemed to me that I saw the briefcase jerk in his grasp, as though something inside it were trying to get out.
I remembered very well how it had torn through the fuselage of the plane like butter.
They moved into the front reception room. She switched on large screen in the corner. Dr Sorle addressed himself to it.
I heard the words that were said. ‘I am delivering the briefcase and the scientists will have instructions for how to store it. Your part is only to release the funds and set this thing in motion.’
He opened the briefcase. There was a roar, a flare of light that swamped the image, and the camera cut.
I cross-referenced with other recorders in the house. Oddly, the camera from the rear hall didn’t pick up any flashes even though it was in a position to catch bright light emerging from the open doors of the library. So the flare of light must have been a fault inside the camera itself.
Bethany was seen running out of the room and up the stairs. The bedroom camera showed her fending off the dogs that had been locked in the room. She was going through her closets and drawers, searching for something. Downstairs there was a noisy crash, as of furniture falling over. A glass-mounted painting in the hallway was seen to move as the reflection of light in the glass stirred. A man’s voice shouted, ‘No! Not here!’ Then a series of bangs and thumps.
Locking the dogs in her bedroom, Bethany came back down, carrying a small bag. She edged around the closed doors of the library and hurried into the kitchen, cringing as a hair-raising sort of animal squeal came from the library. She rummaged in her handbag, then dropped it on the kitchen counter and ran outside barefoot.
The camera lost her halfway down the garden.
As Bethany reached the kitchen, Dr Sorle came staggering out of the library, winded. He was bent over, dragging the briefcase as though it were a loaded sledge. He hauled it through the kitchen and down the garden. Out of frame.
There were no cameras at the back of the garden.
I could see the garden from here in the kitchen. I switched on the security lights. There was the door I had closed and then locked when I’d first come.
I went back outside with a torch. I looked around the door at the back of the garden for any evidence. I listened with all my senses. There was just no way to know what had happened.
The dogs had followed me and they whined to get out of the back of the garden, so I got their leads and brought them with me. The alley was empty except for some recycling bins. I walked the dogs around the block and let them into the locked gardens across the street. The gardens were empty and silent, and I was wondering how long I could keep up the dog-sitter charade when I noticed something.
There was a radio signal pulsing from the iron fence around the gardens. I prowled through the bushes, looking for the source. Finally I spotted a tiny camera attached to a holly branch.
‘Amateur,’ I muttered. Staying out of its line of sight, I reached up and crushed it between my fingers like a roach. Then I went back inside and heated up some instant soup. I closed the shutters and turned off most of the lights. The dogs fell asleep.
Two hours later I was still thinking. I prowled the house looking out of windows and feeling paranoid. When I knelt at the mail slot on the front door, I could detect a new pulse coming from the same location as before.
‘Come on, guys,’ I called to the dogs. ‘Walkies. Bring your noses.’
Notes on upgrades
Archives retained in older versions will be automatically compressed for use in upgrades. In default mode waveforms must be individually selected for deletion/editing.
To change from default mode and enable automatic deletion of older generation archives see Section 4.5a.
Upgraded versions of the application can be set to run as older versions under selected conditions. Cautions must be observed due to the risk of waveform Corruption and in rare cases Leakage. Symptoms of Leakage include but are not limited to sonic emission, weather disturbance, unintentional cognitive synchrony and disruptive interference with similar waveforms. When waveforms share 98% or more similarity Leakage can escalate to Resonance or Identification.
These conditions are usually self-correcting.
Risk of the above syndromes is very low for pristine samples collected and stored without editing. Edited waveforms are thought to be prone to the phenomenological protrusion Identification, which can result in loss of administrative control of the unit. The percentage of material altered through editing is roughly proportional to the risk of Resonance and Identification.
To assist in evaluating these risks a table of constants of proportionality under a range of environmental conditions is provided in Appendix F.
A prosaic tearing sound
I took the dogs to the place where the camera had been installed. ‘Do you smell Jeff?’ I said to them as they sniffed all around and took turns peeing on whatever they smelled. ‘Go find him.’
They dragged me across the garden and out the other side, their enthusiasm compromising my rotor cuff until I gave up and broke into a jog. They were on a scent.
I called the vet on her mobile.
‘What do you know about poisonous frogs?’ I said. ‘Do you have an antidote for that kind of thing?’
‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘Do you think Teacake ate a poisonous frog?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What kind? Depending on what it was I could try an anaesthetic . . .’
‘Giant. Prehistoric,’ I said, then realised I’d been an idiot for saying that, hung up in embarrassment, and turned off the phone. As if that would fix things.
The sun was already gone. As we crossed over the tram line at Princes Street Gardens a mossy perfume of atomised rain drifted more or less down. Eventually I realised we were making for Holyrood Park and the rocky uprising of Arthur’s Seat that owned the town. The green and grey wave of rock surged towards the sky and reminded me how very old the world is, for real. As we came closer I could smell the magma. Could feel the emptiness down below where the chamber was, where the heat of the earth turning itself inside out must have boiled up to give rise to this landscape. If I quietened my mind I could hear the bass drone that signified a great energy that once was.
It’s the was that gets to me. Because it’s all gone now, and yet somehow I can’t accept that. My now seems to enclose other nows in a way that I don’t think Eckhardt Toll would approve of.
I spotted Two Phones ahead. He set off up the main path. There were other walkers and dogs, some with torches, and in the ground light I could see veils of mist scrolling down from Arthur’s Seat. The scene was spooky, but it never occurred to me to feel scared. People don’t frighten me in the slightest. Marquita was always telling me off for it.
‘You are not Batfink,’ she’d say. ‘Bullets can harm you. And your wings are not a shield of steel, OK? They’re more like a trans-dimensional extrasensory resource, as I understand it.’
I never paid attention to her. Humans didn’t seem capable of aggression toward me. Before I got the airline job I had worked in a prison for a while and I had worked cleaning buses at the Port Authority, and I had done the work of the Resistance there, too. I had cleaned up people’s puke and I had given them a helping hand and a boost of courage, and I had noticed their humanity even when they couldn’t see it anymore themselves. Nobody ever tried to hurt me. I’d like to think it’s because the ones who are the most dangerous to themselves and others are also the ones who need me most.
Then again, when you are my size it’s hard to take physical threats from humans seriously. Even with my wings furled and my power body folded, I’m a commanding presence. That was one reason why it was tough to follow Two Phones without making it obvious I was following him. I let him get too far ahead, and then I lost sight of him in the darkness. The dogs had stopped straining at their leads.
‘This is not going well, guys,’ I said to the dogs. ‘We didn’t lose him, did we? Did we?’
I let them off their leads and they bounded off through the rough grass purposefully, but in different directions. Great.
I stayed on the path, which led through a sort of valley and then came out on the side of the hill. It wound around the spire of Arthur’s Seat, overlooking different parts of the city as it made its rising circuit. I found myself climbing the south-west side with the university campus and its observatory visible in the distance, breathing deep as my legs felt the ascent. I looked at the ground before my feet, until something told me to look up.
Dr Sorle was standing on a rocky outcropping above me. A few pieces of scree tumbled down and bounced at my feet. Wind thumped into my chest like it wanted to play.
Two Phones was on the path between me and Dr Sorle, and because of the way distant yellow streetlights blurred the damp air he was almost invisible in deep shadow. I shrank into myself, edging sideways and out of the doctor’s line of sight. I watched him carefully when he moved. He was not limping even a little.
‘I’m not coming in,’ he said in a rumbling, musical voice. ‘Turn around and go home, and don’t send anyone else. That will only make it worse.’
‘If the briefcase contains everything you say, we won’t need you,’ Two Phones said.
‘The briefcase contains everything you could possibly need to convict Austen Stevens,’ Kisi Sorle said. ‘It contains all that and more.’
‘We’ll establish that ourselves. If you’re telling the truth then we’re in business. If you’re not—’
‘See for yourself,’ the smaller man said quietly, lifting up the briefcase. It swung from his hand, and I thought what a risk he was taking. I remembered how it had torn open the hull of the plane; I half-expected it to fly up in the clouds or plummet into the earth.
Two Phones said, ‘Put it down on the rocks, just there.’
It was hard to see the details of this because of the light and the angle of the rocks that were above Two Phones and me. I had the impression that Kisi stooped and I could see his heat rising from the general area, even though I couldn’t see him. He must have been bent over for several seconds.
‘Now
open it and step away,’ commanded Two Phones.
This was too easy. I waited for the man with the briefcase to make some sudden move, but he was no longer visible. Two Phones didn’t even seem to be armed. He stood on the path with his weight on one hip so that he looked almost casual, but I could see one hand by his side, trembling. ‘Come and get it,’ Kisi Sorle called. Two Phones shifted his weight from foot to foot. One of his phones rang and he killed it. Then he set off up the rocks. He looked awkward in his chinos and his too-tight polo shirt, and he seemed reluctant to put his hands down to steady himself. He moved as if he were used to climbing stair machines, not real hills.
He got to the top.
The heat profile of the area around Kisi Sorle abruptly grew bigger. I felt the briefcase open as if it were my own throat, and for an instant I saw and heard and felt and understood certain things very clearly—
—for one moment like a suspended droplet I got a postcard from home and I remembered my own origin in a vibrantly dense flash of information—
And then it was gone and I had no time to think about what I’d glimpsed. No time at all, because the rocks around the place where Kisi Sorle had been stretched their boundaries and became very large and entirely different. I saw teeth. Heat blossomed out of the stone as the clouds above were blotted out by the near wing of the qzetzlcoatlus. Great darkness, smelling of metal. I saw one long, silvery eye before Two Phones was seized in jaws that might have been made of steel and they might have been made of efreeti smoke. Anybody’s call.
There weren’t any screams. Only a prosaic tearing sound.
Lemme see you walk
I was tripping over myself to get away – backward, side on, you name it. I heard barking. Below, both dogs came into view as though unglued from the background darkness. They converged on me and I pushed their heads down as they tried to get up in my face and sniff me. In silence the pterosaur had melted down to become a small inanimate thing, indistinguishable from rock and shadow, but I could feel a tugging sensation on my skin that made me . . . Well, uneasy just isn’t the word.
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