by Greg Chivers
Moshe is silent for a full twenty seconds; then he explodes with laughter and the dye-jobs echo him, shifting instantly from mute terror to hilarity. ‘Haaa! That was fucking hilarious, man! Fucking awesome! You promised me insanity! You promised it! Sometimes I swear you’re full of shit, but, man, you deliver!’
I try to relax and let the music shiver through my body. Tomorrow is only an hour away.
16.
Silas
A parallelogram of glass smaller than a fingernail falls from my hair. It tinkles faintly when it hits the polished ceramic of the basin in my office’s en-suite. This is disappointing. It’s almost thirty-six hours since my energetic little stunt and I’d hoped to leave every trace of it behind.
‘Sybil, I think it’s in my pants!’ My voice echoes deafeningly against the closed cedar-wood door. Despairing, I abandon the effort to tame the strands of hair straying across my scalp and turn to poke it open with a foot. ‘Sybil!’
She appears, visible only as a sliver through the barely open door, eyes averted to eliminate the possibility of seeing anything unfortunate. ‘Do you want me to look?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You promised me it would shower out. I’ve had three since Friday and I swear I still crunch when I sit down.’
Her eyes roll. ‘What I told you was based on the specifications of the manufacturers of the safety glass. They claim it will shatter into fragments no smaller than four centimetres – easy to find, unlikely to enter ears or airways. I can take it up with them?’
‘Oh, forget about it.’ She waits silently, gauging my mood. It’s true, on occasion Sibyl veers uncomfortably towards mockery, and a more fragile man might jibe at the occasional implied insult, but it is a small price to pay for her powers. ‘Any word about young Levi Peres?’
‘Not much; he checked in to ask about some data on the target, but I don’t know what he’s doing with it. Surveillance is difficult. He’s careful, and it’s his neighbourhood. Our informer reports his movements have been more or less the usual routine.’
‘What’s he waiting for? I’ve made sure that warehouse is wide open.’ In the grander scheme of things, the cost of the bribes I pay for the relevant people to turn a blind eye are negligible, but goodwill expires quicker than it used to, and I have other plans that will need the Machine Cult’s money.
‘He still has a couple of days on the schedule you gave him. Do you want me to have him brought in?’
‘God, no! Stick to the plan. Arm’s length until we need an arrest.’
‘Yes, minister.’
‘All right then, what about Amos? Any signs of life? He must know something’s up.’
She nods, looking away briefly as I adjust my trousers before emerging into the office proper and settling at my desk. ‘Oh, he knows, but I can’t tell you what he’s doing about it. He’s upped the security for his office – EM sweeps at random intervals two to three times daily. That’s practically wartime protocol, so we have to work on the assumption that our electronic surveillance has gone dark permanently.’
‘Annoying, but it was bound to happen sooner or later. Let me know the moment he does anything more substantive than basic security.’ Sybil smiles uneasily, sensing my tension. Petty thievery is one thing, but Amos Glassberg, pillar of the establishment, is the keystone in all of this. As long as he remains in place, everything else I have lined up is at a standstill. It’s more than six months since I opened tentative, necessarily covert negotiations with associates in Amman, Haifa, and Eilat. The new cities are still tiny, built from scratch in the last half-century since the fourth war because they lacked even the partial protection afforded by Jerusalem’s sanctity, but they are at a tipping point now, hungry for the opportunities offered by being part of something greater than a one-street desert town. The appetite for a new country, unbounded by the deadening constraints of race and religion that doomed the old, dead nations, is palpable. The Greater Levant Co-Prosperity Sphere could drag us out of being an irrelevant backwater, forced to trade under humiliating terms with the great powers for any remotely modern tech, but Glassberg is the brake on all of this. The people still respect him, even if the stability he offers is nothing more than a guarantee of stagnation.
Sybil grimaces. ‘It’s going to be difficult while GIassberg’s being so careful. I’ll try.’
‘I’m sorry, what?’
She flinches at the rebuke before catching herself. On the whole, she requires little in the way of external motivation, but a few modest fireworks eliminate the possibility of any misunderstandings as to where my priorities lie.
‘I’ll let you know the instant he makes a move.’
‘Better. Anything else? Or is there a chance I might be able to keep my morning appointment with the lovely Consuelo?’
‘Uh …’ The single syllable, uttered reluctantly, banishes any hopes I harboured of a good day. With Sibyl, hesitation is an unfailing harbinger of the awful. ‘I’m afraid there is some bad news. I would normally try to avoid bothering you with something like this, but in the circumstances …’
‘Come on. Out with it.’
‘It’s Boutros, sir.’
‘Boutros?’
‘The curator responsible for the Antikythera Mechanism.’
‘Ugh, that man is a pain. His obsession with the thing borders on the pathological. You’d think it was his mother’s ashes. What about him?’
‘He didn’t turn up for work again, so museum management sent someone round to his apartment. They found him dead on the floor of his living room.’
‘Dead? We didn’t …’
‘No. Your orders were very clear on that point. He was to be left unharmed, no matter how much of a fuss he kicked up. It looks like a suicide.’
‘Looks?’ If someone has decided to make a point, they have chosen a poor moment. An obvious death draws dangerous attention. There is too much at stake now. ‘Why would anyone think anything else? Think carefully, Sybil. Your answer could have a rather dramatic effect on all our futures.’
She smiles at the slightly oblique reference to her promised reward. If everything goes to plan, she will occupy this desk in a few months’ time, no doubt pouring scorn on a deputy of her own. Sometimes her hunger for it is palpable; in her rare unguarded moments you can see the fierce smile as she imagines her ascension, but there is no sign of exultation now. Something has disturbed her.
‘According to the autopsy, there is nothing anywhere on him that could be a fatal wound, and no trace of drugs or poison in his system.’
‘So he just lay down on the floor and died of grief that I took away his favourite toy?’
‘We’ve both seen stranger things happen, but no. He has injuries to his hands: multiple breaks and dislocations in all the joints like someone tried to tie them in a knot. And …’ She stops, uncertain.
‘What?’
Her voice lowers to a whisper. ‘His fingernails were missing. All of them gone.’
17.
Clementine
‘Are we on?’
‘Yeah, we’re on.’ Levi’s face shines with nervous sweat even though we haven’t left Yusuf’s bar. He’s still wearing that damn jacket. It makes a kind of sense though. He’s known. The most suspicious thing Levi Peres could do is dress like someone else. He doesn’t have any other clothes anyway. I know this because I’ve spent almost all of the last three days in his apartment. It is now marginally less of a shithole; there was nothing to do but clean.
‘Hey, beautiful!’ Yusuf waves me over to the bar. Levi turns around too, but gets a shake of the head from the barman. ‘I love you too, man, just not in that way.’
‘Fuck you very much.’
Levi’s twitchy. Not good.
Yusuf ignores the insult and beckons me over again. ‘Don’t worry about him. He gets like this whenever he has to work for a living. I just wanted to say – if things go bad, and you need an alibi, you just tell them you were with Yusuf all night. I’ll back you up on i
t. One hundred per cent.’
‘Yusuf, I’m touched. We hardly know each other.’
‘What can I say? That’s just the kind of guy I am. Good luck.’
Levi straightens the shoulder straps on his bag and puts a hand through the rainbow bead curtain covering the doorway. His foot catches on the step. His knee hits the floor with a hollow sound. A hiss of pain slides from his lips.
‘You OK, Levi?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m good.’ His arm shakes as he pushes himself off the floor. A gust from outside carries a whiff of acrid sweat up to me as I lean down to give him a hand.
‘Levi, have you been drinking? Are you hungover?’
‘It’s not what it looks like, Clem.’ Flakes of dry skin come away as he scratches the long stubble on his neck. He’s one of those guys who can shave before breakfast and look like a Neanderthal before lunch. Of course, Levi never eats breakfast.
‘This is serious. We have to be on our game.’
‘I know, Clem. I just …’ A sweaty hand tries to wipe guilt from his face. ‘… owed a guy. The guy who got us the gear for the job.’
‘And he couldn’t wait to party until after the job?’
‘No.’
‘Shit. What did you take? Are you still high?’
‘Bounce. No, I don’t think so.’
‘OK. Change of plan, I’m driving.’ I put my hand on the driver’s-side door of the rusty white van parked in the street. His hand lands on mine. His grip is clammy but firm, no trace of shake in it now.
‘You want to get there? You don’t drive in Jerusalem.’
I slide my hand out from under his and walk over to the passenger side. The cab smells of sweat and stale tobacco and the seat is covered with a mat made of small wooden balls. I hold my breath while Levi makes three cursing attempts to start the engine. It clatters into uncertain life and a pair of miniature boxing gloves hanging from a string starts to sway in time with its vibration. Gears crunch and we lurch forward out of the afternoon shadow that covers half the street.
‘So what does it feel like?’ He looks away from the windscreen and the traffic beyond, squinting like he’s trying to see the metal inside me.
‘What?’
‘When you do your thing – what does it feel like?’
‘Sore.’
‘That’s it? Sore? That’s all you’re gonna give me?’ He shakes his head, keeping his eyes fixed on the road now. ‘We’re supposed to be partners.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
His fingers tap a rhythm on the steering wheel to a silent song playing in his head. There is no guile in these enquiries. A part of me yearns to tell, to unburden myself of secrets grown heavier since I arrived alone in this city, but for all his many faults, Levi does not deserve to be put in danger.
‘It hurts because I wanted it to hurt. Every time I “do my thing” I become more like something I don’t want to be, and the pain is the price. I only want to be normal, like you.’
‘Ha! Nobody ever called me normal before.’
His dark curled head joins his fingers in their dance and the traffic outside the windows fades to insubstantiality as my mind slips into its worn groove of assessing variables and calculating probabilities. This journey should take around twenty-four minutes. In less than one hour the first phase of the job should be complete. The wheels are already in motion.
Forty-six minutes ago, at exactly 2.21 p.m., the door guard at the storage facility signed for a package weighing 5.2 kilos. The labels on it were rudimentary but convincing forgeries indicating it came from the museum, and was destined for the category B storage area containing the Antikythera Mechanism.
My projection of the events that follow is guesswork based on probabilities. Almost certainly, the guard looks for the incoming package on a delivery schedule or ledger; he won’t find anything. That much I’m confident about. We used the same courier firm as the museum, so the delivery itself should not arouse suspicion, but there will be procedures he wants to follow, boxes to tick – he won’t be able to. The logical course of action is for him to call the museum, but if he tries, he’ll be reminded the admin staff don’t work on Sundays. The only people picking up the phone are the front-of-house staff, who won’t know anything about any package: they wouldn’t, even if it was legitimate. While all this is going on, the courier is on the clock, and he’ll want this thing off his hands. The guard has an emergency number he can call, but he’ll have to make a subjective, potentially humiliating, judgement as to whether the arrival of a small package constitutes an emergency. It’s a deposit, not a withdrawal. The closest thing he can do to following procedure is to make his own temporary record of the ID number on our label, and leave a note for the Monday guard to ask about it. I’ve run it through data-based simulations two hundred thousand times in the last three days, switching up all the variables I could think of. Nine times out of ten, it works up to this point.
Everything we’re about to do depends on the package being there – it’s a calculated risk, but there are no safe options. It would be comforting to have a little transmitter in it telling us where it is, but the AIs in the warehouse would be all over that. For the time being, the insulated five-kilo box remains entirely dormant.
A low buzz is a trapped fly battering its bulbous red eyes against the windscreen, defeated by a barrier they cannot perceive. Levi’s knuckles are white on the wheel of the borrowed truck as he turns the tight corner out of the Lions’ Gate onto the main road. I can hear him breathe. I can’t tell if it’s just nerves or chemically induced paranoia from the substances he consumed last night. My own stomach stirs with the queasiness of adrenaline and my pulse throbs quicker in my neck, but looking at the livid streak of fear shining through Levi makes me suspect my ersatz biochemistry is a pale shadow of the true human. Do I feel what they feel? I will never know. All I can know is that I feel something where once I felt nothing. The difference is existential – worth dying for.
The truck stops with a shudder that breaks my train of thought. We’re in one of the parking bays for the plumbing supply store, a little over thirty metres from the front entrance to the storage facility. Levi coughs and turns to me. ‘Are we close enough?’
‘Probably.’ I don’t want to see him try to start the truck again, not with people watching. ‘You’ve got the target’s exact location within the warehouse?’
He nods. ‘My guy confirmed yesterday.’
‘OK. Just watch me until the signal comes through your line.’
I sink back onto the seat with my eyes closed. The sensation of those small wooden balls against my spine is momentarily distracting, but it fades as my other senses extend and I become aware of the flow of transmissions around me. The truck’s fug of stale tobacco disappears into a swirling cocktail of olfactory analogues – the plumbing store’s data server, seventy-four nearby personal communication implants, the non-committal hum of the city-net. All of it’s irrelevant. I focus on the almost blank space of the storage facility, find the barely perceptible trickle of data flowing into it.
Three sharp inhalations.
All trace of physical awareness vanishes as I abandon myself to the flow. My body is a corpse in Levi’s care until this is done.
Inside, it is sudden silence. The absence of noise is like a cooling balm. I become suddenly conscious of the effort I have expended shutting out the clamour of the city since I arrived. I could lose myself here, were it not for the three distinct scents of the guardian AIs marking this territory as their own.The citrus tang of the Shimezu AI running the visual-security systems reeks of danger. The menthol of the audio monitor is a more cautiously watchful presence. Compared to them, the musty toffee sub-routine operating the pressure sensors is a sleeping dog. Under their noses, I release a small, apparently unencrypted data burst, a trickle in the pool indistinguishable from the watchman’s flow of sport and porn.
Our package awakens.
&nbs
p; I cannot perceive what happens within, only wait while the device created by Levi’s friend works its magic. At the bottom of an insulated box thirty centimetres wide and forty centimetres high, a small array of thick metal coils heats up, drawing current from the lithium batteries beneath them. Their heat passes into a block of solidified carbon dioxide flash-frozen around them. It should take exactly six minutes for this two-kilo lump to sublime into gas. When the pressure of the expanding gas inside reaches 1.4 bar, the box lid will pop open.
Another innocuous data burst sends a pre-arranged signal to Levi’s comm-plant. A distant part of me registers the sound of the truck door closing behind him. That’s my cue to wake up the sleeping dog. The musty toffee presence shifts drowsily in response to a sudden bombardment of information. Like the faithful guardian it is, it tries to inspect every package, but the stream becomes a torrent. A smarter AI would figure out something was up, or at least prioritize the data, institute some kind of sorting system, but ol’ faithful here would count the grains of sand on a beach, and I’ve provided just enough grains to keep it busy for eight minutes.
The imagined image of the block of frozen gas disappearing in streams of faint white smoke occupies me while I wait for it to become reality. It takes only an inch of evanescence to reveal the flight blades of the drone concealed within. They whir into life with a thought, dissipating the pale clouds above, but the drone’s landing skids remain trapped in the slowly vanishing block. Everything hangs on Levi now.