by Greg Chivers
His job is simple enough. Turn up at the deliveries window, engage the guard in conversation, position the palm-sized jammer close enough to his viewing station to block the visual feed from the AI-controlled cameras, and switch it on. If last night’s activities haven’t entirely ruined his cognitive faculties, it should be straightforward.
The last of the frozen gas puffs away and the freed drone rises out of the box, the lid closing silently beneath it. The citrus tang of the Shimezu AI sharpens instantly in response to this intruder into its domain. I follow the feeds of six cameras tracking it. The data flows unimpeded to the guard’s viewing station on a priority stream. Levi! The drone drops out of the air and skittles onto the hard warehouse floor as I break my connection to it and pull back my consciousness to hijack Levi’s comm-plant.
‘Levi Peres!’ Verbalized thought is a confusion in the moment of adjustment. The grating shift to the slow, imperfect information of speech makes me crave the smooth refuge of the digital. ‘Levi, you dumb fuck, turn the jammer on!’
‘It’s … on.’ The sub-vocalized thought coming through his comm-plant line is snail’s pace. He must be doing it at the same time as maintaining a realtime conversation with the guard. Or he’s still out of his head from the drugs.
‘Then your party friend has fucked us over with that gear. We’re going to have to do this on camera. Keep the guard looking away from his screens. I’ll be quick.’
‘Fine, whatever. Just get out of my head.’ The words are terse but quicker now. It’s possible I have underestimated Levi. Not many humans can maintain two conversations, and he’s doing it with amphetamine residue in his system. He won’t be able to keep that up though.
I sink deeper into myself and extend my consciousness into the drone. Four polycarbonate rotors spin silently into life and the thing wobbles seventy centimetres into the air. Around me, the frantic pulses of the Shimezu AI fill the warehouse’s available data streams as it tries to alert the guard to the images coming from its cameras. If he doesn’t respond within two minutes, it will bypass him to contact armed security units directly. I shut out the blaring, urgent signals. I try not to think I’m back in France, still running from my creators.
Time to fly.
I settle the drone’s landing skids on the box lid. They are twenty centimetres apart – exactly the width of the label from the courier company. This is not a coincidence. The five-millimetre-wide manipulators in its four feet pinch the loosely attached piece of paper and I feed just enough power into the rotors to apply a gentle lift. The label tears minutely at one corner, then comes away. The drone edges through space towards its target, bearing a single piece of paper underneath.
I have one minute and twenty seconds; less if Levi forgets how to talk.
The drone’s cameras offer two views – a tight angle directly underneath, almost entirely obscured by the paper, and a wide angle that distorts the entire warehouse interior into a weird fishbowl. My stomach lurches as my senses make the necessary algorithmic adjustments to navigate using the skewed view. As the drone wobbles closer, the target shifts from being a warped polygon to something resembling the square metal box it must be. Directly above, I am blind, but I control my descent using my blindness as guide. If the box’s black edge veers into view, it means I am off course.
One minute and five seconds.
A faint sensation of impact is the left landing skid touching down on the box lid. The right skid follows moments later in a lop-sided final approach. A length of brass wire along the bottom of each skid heats up in response to a brief flow of current from the drone’s over-taxed battery. The momentary warmth is enough to soften the adhesive painted to the underside of the label. The glue becomes tacky, then spreads, forming a fragile bond with the box lid beneath.
Fifty-five seconds.
Now I must wait. If the drone takes off before the adhesive is set, the label comes with it and our little adventure is over. The instructions on the back of the glue tube said to allow ten seconds. They make no allowance for local variations in moisture level or temperature. I have to be certain.
Thirty-five seconds.
The drone comes away clean. As it rises, I see the label is fractionally off-centre on the box lid. The small tear in the top left corner of the paper screams at me, an inconsistency that a guard or courier could easily pick up, but the die is cast. My stomach stops lurching now I can use the undistorted lens in the drone’s belly to navigate. Settling it back into the insulated box is child’s play compared to the half-blind flight to the target.
The lid closes on top of it with a full six seconds to spare.
The frantic transmissions from the visual monitoring AI cease. There is no incident to attend to, just a report of unusual activity for the guard to investigate. I bury it in another torrent of spam to the guard’s workstation. The top-end AI would see through it in a flash, but humans struggle to prioritize. If he even bothers to stop talking to Levi, he’ll be like the sleepy toffee watchdog, counting grains of sand.
Another burst of current from the battery in the base of our insulated box opens a small reservoir of freon. The liquid gas circulates up through channels in the array of thick metal coils. It carries warmth from the inside to almost invisible rails running along its exterior edges. In less than a minute, the simple heat-exchange mechanism drops the temperature inside the box to freezing. In another two, ice crystals are forming on the drone’s legs, condensed from moisture in the air. It takes less than five to accrete a block of water ice exactly matching the weight of the solidified carbon dioxide we sent in. Toffee finishes counting its grains of sand, and everything in the warehouse weighs the exact same amount it did when it started. As far as that AI is concerned, nothing has happened, nothing is missing.
The sound of the truck door slamming hard shocks me back to physical consciousness. Levi’s sitting in the driver’s seat, leaning towards me, staring hard. ‘So what happened? What do we do now?’
‘We … wait.’ I hear my voice as a stranger’s, four tones higher than my self-image, a little girl so tired she struggles to speak.
‘Wait? Wait for what?’
‘Go home. Wait … they bring … to us.’
‘Are you serious? That’s it? All I had to do was talk to that guy about soap operas for five minutes? That’s a fucking cinch, man!’
My eyes close and my body slumps on the slipperiness of the brown wooden beads covering the seat. The last thing I hear before it surrenders to sleep is Levi calling my name.
18.
Levi
Clementine’s out cold on the couch. She hasn’t moved for eighteen hours. She’s kind of pale and breathing shallow, but she seems OK. I’m just going to leave her there for as long as it takes. I don’t get it though – all she did was sit in the passenger seat of the truck with her eyes closed. For maybe ten minutes, tops. I’m the one who had to physically go in there; I could be recognized. Whatever. It means I’m on my own for the pickup but I can handle that.
I have to cross most of the city to get to the Binyanei station where the package is waiting for me in a locker, probably. The message from the courier company said they picked it up at nine thirty, and gave me a code for opening it. There’s no reason to think anything’s gone wrong. If anyone had noticed the switch they’d be all over us by now.
It’s maybe a three-mile walk to Etz Haim and the Binyanei. At a safe pace it’ll take me an hour; walking too fast got me busted a couple of times when I was a kid pushing Lebanese resin, so I go slow past the crumbled stumps of the old Jaffa Gate where the cops hang out. The stone of the ruins around the edges of the Old City is still black from the last war. The patch of rubble opposite the gate has a name, Merkaz Mis’hari. The city council had it decontaminated the minute the war was over, priority one regeneration for future development, but nobody touches it. Even the street hawkers take their carts someplace else. Some people say Herod the Great’s tomb is down there, maybe even his bones. It
’s probably bullshit, but enough people believe it that you’d have to be insane to mess with that real estate. The end result is this weird holy emptiness between the Old City and all the new shit outside.
I keep to small streets for shade and clean air, and to look normal. People expect to see Levi Peres out and about. They expect me to stop and talk. If I was speed-walking along Hanevi’im it wouldn’t take long for somebody to figure something was up. I skirt around the edges of Independence Park – it’s too open and too full of beggars trying to hit up tourists. The buildings beyond are a wall of grey concrete blocks with brown-tinted windows that look dirty all the time. As I walk, the sun slips through the gaps between them. When the light hits my eyes I still see the colours from Saturday night. Fucking bounce.
A flashing bugle icon at the edge of my vision is an incoming signal on my comm-plant. It’s Silas.
‘Levi Peres. I’ll make this quick. I’m on a timetable. Do you understand you only get paid for delivering on schedule? You understand there will be consequences for a failure to deliver the goods? You think you can just take my money and go round pretending to be some kind of big-shot in the clubs and I won’t know about it?’
‘I’ve got it.’
A pause. ‘Got what?’
‘The item, it’s secure.’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Levi Peres! I’m not some fucking mark buying cheap souvenirs at the Temple Mount. You can’t talk your way out of this.’
‘Silas, I’ve got it. We never discussed pickup. How do you want to work this?’ The line goes dead. Silas Mizrachi is not accustomed to surprises. Now he’s going to be thinking about how he wants the pickup to play out, which means he’s trying to work out a way to get what he wants without paying me. Knowing Silas, I have to acknowledge the possibility this process could be hazardous to my health; Yusuf heard about a guy they found face down in the aqueduct after getting mixed up in Silas’s business, but I’m cool. I just have to present him with a situation where paying me is the easiest option. For that, I need to get my hands on the package.
Tiny crystals in the central station’s steps glitter under my feet as I walk down into the wide shadowed hole of the entrance. It’s like going into an underground museum or something. Everything’s old down here, like the wars never happened. I read one of the tourist guidebooks once. They said it was built this way – a twisting spiral leading to rail tracks seventy metres underground – so it could be an emergency shelter if the city was ever attacked. Well, guess what? Shit happens.
There’s hardly anyone around. Most of the shops are vacant. The only train from here goes to Tel Aviv. Who the fuck wants to go to Tel Aviv? My parents used to take us – nothing there but bad food and sand, so the trains are mostly empty. The transport ministry keeps promising the line’s going to extend to Haifa and there’ll be another one south to Eilat. It’s just one of the things they say at election time to make it look like they do something. No one’s going to build across the Negev – it’s still a radioactive crater park. So I’m just standing here in this ghost of a station, looking at a row of lockers someone built two hundred years ago.
They still look new. I guess nobody ever used them. Who needs lockers in a bomb shelter? Two whole rows of them are coloured yellow and blue in the livery of the courier company. They took out the old coin slots and replaced them with key-code pads. I think it would be nice to leave this old stuff the way it was – a little slice of the twenty-first century – but that’s the problem with Jerusalem: too much history gets in the way of business. It takes me about a minute to find the right one, trying not to look like I’m checking to see if I’m being watched.
Locker twenty-two clicks open when I punch in the code number on the receipt from the courier company. I realize I’m holding my breath as I pull the black plastic handle. What’s going to happen? It’s a goddamn box. Yeah, there it is – black metal, about forty centimetres wide, thirty high, brass reinforcements at the corners, and our label at the top. Clementine, whoever the fuck you are, whatever the fuck you are, you are a genius, but we have got to talk as soon as you’re done sleeping.
Metal squeaks on metal, just loud enough to make me anxious, as I tug the thing out of the locker and slip it into a canvas bag. Maybe nobody knows it’s gone, but I still don’t want to advertise I got it. My fingers tingle as the box passes through them. Silas didn’t say anything about what’s in here. If I thought I was going to get paid straight up, I’d say it wasn’t any of my business, but if he’s going to make life hard, it makes sense to take an interest. Not here, though. I turn and walk towards the steps of the entrance, the canvas bag bundled in my arms, my head down. I’m almost back into daylight when I see a pair of spotless white sneakers stepping down in my direction.
‘Levi Peres! As I live and breathe! What brings you to the station, my young friend? I never figured you for the trainspotting type.’ The white shark’s-tooth grin of Shant Manoukian fills my vision when I look up.
‘Good to see you, Shant. I know that I owe you, and I mean no disrespect, but I’m working right now. I can’t stop to talk.’ His left hand lands on my shoulder, squeezing the bone underneath the leather. I’m not going anywhere. This isn’t a coincidence. My eyes flick around to check if Shant’s got company. He sees the movement and lets out a chuckle that says he doesn’t give a shit where I look.
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Levi.’ My grip tightens on the package. I’m giving too much away. Be cool. You don’t know what he knows. ‘You gotta understand – when a young guy like you starts discussing serious business, a guy like me is gonna take an interest. That’s … the natural order of things. Maybe you didn’t know this, but that courier company you used – it’s one of my … our business interests.’ Fuck, fuck, fuck, I am so fucked. How could I not know that? He shakes his head and smiles as if he heard the thought. ‘Don’t be beating yourself up, kid. You ran a real smooth job. You got potential. It just so happens the courier business is what we do – that and waste disposal – we just don’t like to talk about it.’
‘Yeah, well, if we’re done with the compliments, I got a buyer. I got to deliver.’ I take a step to Shant’s side, but his fingers dig hard into the muscles of my shoulder joint, pinning me in place.
‘Be cool, Levi. If you’re smart, I might even let you keep that little piece of history in the box. I’m not an antiques kind of guy. It’s your partner I’m interested in. That kind of talent could be very lucrative.’
I know he’s lying to me; that’s a given. Let me keep the box? No way Shant Manoukian isn’t gonna work every angle on this. The only edge I have is he still thinks I’m a dumb kid who doesn’t understand how business works. Keep thinking that, you Brylcreem fuck.
His hand shifts from my shoulder to my elbow, and he shoves me across the station plaza towards a dark-windowed car sitting at the front of an empty taxi stand. I could run, but I’d have to drop the bag, and I’d have to keep running all the way out of the city. I’m not ready to do either. One of the back doors pops open and a huge bald-headed Armenian in the driver’s seat grins at me as I duck in, like he knows what I’ve got coming. Shant slides into the leather seat next to me and his tracksuit jacket falls open, showing me the gun under his shoulder. Like it makes any difference. He taps the goon on the shoulder and points.
‘Tigran, go.’ Baldy turns to the dash and presses a button, then unfolds a screen and watches golf while the car drives itself. ‘Levi, you asked me a question. Out of respect for what you’ve done, I’ll give you an answer. You introduced me to your friend Moshe. He’s a real interesting guy. He was very proud of some of the equipment he put together for you and your partner. He thinks very highly of you, Levi. It’s just … how can I put this? He thinks maybe you’re not the right guy to be looking after his social schedule any more. Maybe he might get more of what he’s looking for with better connections.’
Moshe, you dumb schmuck. They’ll eat you alive. The car pulls up o
utside the laundromat. Shant gets out first and holds the door open for me like he’s the chauffeur. Tigran has got a big smile on his face like his boss is the funniest guy in the world and the entertainment’s just getting started. As they shadow me up the stairwell, I run through the options I’ve got for getting rid of these guys. It’s a short list. There’s a gun in the kitchen but I’m never going to get to it.
Shant grins and watches intently while I punch in the key code for my door. ‘I feel like we know each other well enough now, we shouldn’t have secrets.’
I push the door open slowly, carefully, like I’m afraid of what’s on the other side, which is pretty dumb when the two guys who want to kill me are standing right behind. ‘Clem? Clementine? Are you OK? We’ve got company …’ I glance back at Shant and he nods in a way that’s probably supposed to be reassuring. If I wasn’t shitting my pants, I’d be annoyed at just how dumb Shant thinks I am. ‘… friends of mine. They want to talk to you about some work.’
My nose wrinkles at an unfamiliar smell – something warm and sweet coming from inside. I step through the doorway to my den, and I just have time to notice Clem’s not lying where she was on my couch when suddenly there’s a roar in my ear like a million metal insects. Pain shoots through my skull and I fall to my knees, ready to curse Shant, but I see he’s on the floor too, looking at me like I did this to us. Baldy is just squinting at us both, confused. Through streaks of bright pain I barely see Clementine emerge from her hiding place behind the door. She does a little double take, like she’s surprised whatever she did to me and Shant hasn’t worked on the big guy, but then moves almost too fast for me to see. She jabs him in the throat with stiffened fingers, then loops her hands behind his head as he reels back, using the leverage to pull him into a flying knee to the solar plexus. He sags under the impact, but his huge arms wrap around her tiny waist as he falls, dragging her down with him. Clementine tries to pull herself away, but his hands lock behind her, and he’s smiling as he propels his massive shining forehead into her nose. Clem falls like a rag doll. The insanity in my ears stops.