by Greg Chivers
I hold her gaze, searching for any sign of mendacity. More than one of history’s great schemes has been undone by the assumption of loyalty, but over the years Sybil has passed every test.
‘Never mind, those questions can wait. The Soviets are going to be all over me unless we deliver the Antikythera Mechanism soon. Without their help, the outcome of the election could still be in doubt. The artefact must be our priority if we’re both going to get what we want.’
She brightens briefly at my acknowledgement of her ambition, but then her face falls into a frown as she considers her words. ‘Our plan was based on the assumption the Mechanicals were going to leave the bunkers in possession of the Antikythera Mechanism. The sniper teams were prepared to seize it from them. Of course, they never emerged.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘Either an unknown third party has seized the device, and somehow evaded our detection, or else it remained down there until the bodies were discovered early this morning. Our source on site thinks it was taken out of there by the police or medical teams who attended the scene.’
‘Thinks? Why didn’t your man take it?’ The edge in my voice elicits a twitch.
‘Khalil had hand-picked men on site within minutes. They kicked out the first responders, Glassberg’s orders.’
‘How could he know? No, never mind, we can puzzle that out later. The Mechanism is the important thing. If Khalil’s men seized evidence, they took it somewhere.’
She sighs. ‘The surveillance team was recording the scene, but the footage cuts out before the bodies and the evidence were taken away. They withdrew when they felt the risk of detection was too high.’
‘In the name of God, what do we pay these people for?’
‘I can fix this. Give me an hour to find out where Khalil’s men took Peres. We find him, we find the artefact.’ She holds my gaze, all trace of fear gone from those eyes, until I nod. ‘The officers who initially attended the scene were from the thirteenth precinct. I’ve spoken to two of them who say they found an unconscious man matching Peres’s description.’
‘So he must be in custody! Have him picked up, delivered here. Get this over with.’ My jaw relaxes, unconsciously at first. I hadn’t realized, didn’t want to, how much this debacle with Peres and the Antikythera Mechanism has been getting to me.
‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple.’ Her words elicit a twitch from the muscles in my cheek.
‘Go on.’
‘It appears he never made it to the holding cells of the station; there’s no arrest record, no custody report, and no record of any evidence seized with him. He’s disappeared.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I assure you, I’ve checked thoroughly.’
‘No, not you – the reports! Amos must be meddling, but how?’
My semi-rhetorical question provokes a look of concern on Sybil’s face. Years as my factotum have not entirely inured her to the strains of being asked the impossible. ‘The only thing I can suggest is that I visit the station in person to find out what’s happening.’
‘Good idea, but you stay here. I’ll go. They’ll obfuscate in front of you and we don’t have time.’
‘Fine. There is another thing.’
‘For God’s sake, what?’
‘Comrade Tchernikov from the Sino-Soviet Republic has been calling again.’
‘And?’
‘He’s bored of talking to me and I’m running out of lines to spin him.’
‘Try to keep him sweet. Send him a pretty boy or something. He’ll see right through it but he might appreciate the gesture. Now, turn the car around. I am going to find Levi Peres and I’m going to drag this Antikythera thing out of his arse if I have to.’
30.
Clementine
Someone is hiding him. There is no record of a prisoner by the name of Levi Peres. Seventeen Levis, one Peres, but not a single conjunction of the two. The police department’s data security is pedestrian compared to the multiple layers of redundancy protecting the museum storage facility. Law-enforcement data is either not valued here, or the antiquities hold an importance I do not understand. Visually, the net presents as layers of blue mesh superimposed onto the buildings. The streams flowing in and out carry the faint tang of the city’s dust – simple metaphor for omnipresent, innocuous data. It would be an effective disguise for something vital, but I am not searching for secrets, just a chain of forgotten banalities that might tell the same story. My senses reach out, searching for any hint of the sharp, characterful smells that might reveal the presence of an AI. Nothing. Still, a sense of being watched pollutes my consciousness, most likely interference from my physical self, hormonal anxiety intruding on the purity of my perception.
The choice of entry mechanisms briefly baffles me: flimsy, archaic password-protected portals, access points for public information, personal devices used for official business – a half-skilled human hacker could flit through without difficulty. A comm-plant with outdated encryption belonging to a privileged user offers a perfect tool for my search.
Multiple pieces of correspondence between officers refer to an arrest made at the Gethsemane bunkers, but there is no name, no record, and no mugshot. Some messages show signs of attached files deleted. The job has been done thoroughly too – the data overwritten beyond the point of recovery. For some reason, Levi has been made to disappear. Fear pours through me, flowing from my body to my higher self, tinting my perceptions of the data grid from blue to bruise-purple. He was afraid of Silas Mizrachi. He said the police would not be able to protect him. That would be a cruel irony – to survive the horror in the tunnel, only to be killed for expediency.
Would Mizrachi cover his tracks like this? I know only what Levi told me of him, and the one-dimensional portrait of a loyal public servant provided by the news feeds. He is an official within a byzantine system I do not understand. Would his position allow him openly to seize a prisoner in police custody, or would he have to employ subterfuge? If I had Levi’s help, I would know what to look for. Without him, all I can do is search for patterns in the hard data, oblique connections that would not occur to a human observer.
External reality intrudes as vibration through my bottom. I am in a car. We are in a car, a small van actually. It felt strange getting in. It was marked with illustrations of vegetables. Sister Ludmila steals glances at me in the moments when she looks away from the road. She does not see the spikes extend from my spine into the fabric of the seat back. To her, my state must now look indistinguishable from the hours spent under control of the entity within the Mechanism.
‘What have you got?’ Traffic drifts past the little window behind her head. The fierce light of the morning sun makes it hard to see her face. The city is visible only as box silhouettes of the light industrial units lining the ring road to the east.
‘Precinct thirteen.’
She looks outside quickly, human instinct to verify visually, but she cannot share my perceptions. ‘You’re sure?’
‘No. All the hard data relating directly to the arrest is gone: not just the records, all correspondence relating to the Gethsemane incident has been expunged. It’s as if it never happened.’
‘So how do you arrive at thirteen?’
‘Officer activity logs. The news report and the photograph happened before the information shutdown. You can see officers present on scene in the video. That gives us a time for the police response. Thirty minutes earlier, the logs for one precinct show a massive spike in activity – officers putting routine duties on hold, checking out additional weaponry and vehicles.’
‘Tenuous.’ She looks straight ahead, concentrating on traffic. ‘That tells us where the responding officers came from, not where he’s being held.’
‘I have corroboration. All trace of authorship has been removed from the file deletion, but the police department’s regulations on data handling make interesting reading. Requests for prisoner data to be modified can on
ly be authorized by two people: the senior information officer, and the chief himself. The information officer is attending a management conference in Timbuktu. The chief appears to have two offices; one of them is in precinct thirteen.’
Her eyes narrow – another person trying to see through me, before turning back to the road. My evidence is circumstantial at best. Two pieces of unconnected information are insufficient to establish correlation. If Mizrachi or someone else in a position of power has decided to make Levi disappear, moving him to another location would be straightforward and logical. The involvement of the city’s police chief hints at another game being played here, but I cannot guess what it might be.
Her hands tighten around the wheel as she guides the van right, onto a slip road taking us west, towards the heart of the city.
‘I hope you’re right.’
A square-jawed man wearing a tight gold dress winks at me. His red lips kiss the air in the wake of a tired officer dragging a junkie across the antiseptic green linoleum floor. The cloying chemical fug of detergent does not quite conceal the whiff from the previous night’s donations of vomit and urine. From somewhere echoes the sound of a woman wailing about a child, real or imagined. The transvestite’s eyes follow the unhappy duo of cop and criminal through the sliding door that leads to the custody suites and then fix upon mine. Ludmila ignores him. His/her theatrics seem invisible to everyone but me. He tuts and turns around to lean against a chest-high L-shaped desk that divides the room, his muscular bottom a jutting invitation to nobody. A sagging man in the uniform of a police sergeant sits on a high stool behind the desk. He does not respond to my presence, even when I stand directly in front of him.
‘Excuse me, are you Elias?’ The name appeared as a countersignature on requests for special-issue weaponry. There were others, but they came up less frequently.
‘Sergeant Elias.’ He doesn’t look up.
‘I would like to visit a prisoner.’ He looks up now, but sags deeper.
‘You here to post bail? What’s the name?’
‘Levi Peres.’
For an instant, his eyes dart to the side before he suppresses the instinct. ‘This is a police station. We don’t have visiting hours. If we’ve got him, you can see your friend when he’s released.’
Ludmila steps up, filling the space beside me. Her shadow falls across the desk. The policeman tries to ignore it.
‘Officer.’
‘Sergeant.’
She snorts. ‘Sergeant, we have made a legitimate request. Is there some problem in processing it?’
‘No, no problem. The “process” is waiting, OK? Can you do that? Have I made myself clear?’
She looms silently for a moment, a statue of judgement weighing a decision. ‘Yes, you’ve made yourself quite clear, sergeant.’ She turns to me. ‘Clementine, please contact the Jerusalem Echo, the New Herald, and Eastern Voice. Inform them the prisoner arrested at the Gethsemane tunnels has gone missing. Police are unable to supply his person, whereabouts, or any explanation of what’s happened to him.’
The sergeant looks at me as if I was the source of his pain, and turns to a fatter, younger man behind him. ‘Joey, take the desk. Give me five …’ He looks at Ludmila, head cocked to one side. ‘Better make it ten.’
‘Sure.’
Elias dismounts from his perch and scurries to a gate at the far end of the desk’s ‘L’, ushering us through. He shuffles to a door in the back wall, which he unlocks and plunges through into a shadowed stairwell beyond without waiting to see if we follow.
The door clicks softly behind us. The vomit smells are gone here, but the detergent fug persists. Our steps echo in the silence as we climb four flights of metal-capped stairs. The policeman doesn’t look at us. Another key card opens another door and we emerge, blinking, into a brightly lit corridor. Somebody crossing it at the far end pays us no attention. Halfway down, Sergeant Elias stops and pulls out a fist-sized clutch of keys attached to a chain at his belt. He uses one to unlock the door, then holds it open a crack, still connected by his steel umbilical, and turns to us for only the second time.
‘You’re going to have to have some kind of conversation with the people in here. It’s not my business. I don’t need to know about it.’
A sharp breath escapes me. Levi sits upright on a folding chair in a trapezium of light from the ceiling lamp. A purple swelling above his left eye distorts his face. He stares straight into space, forearms resting on a robust, square-legged table covered with thick green paint worn through at the edges. A slender figure in a dark suit is bent over the table facing him. The stranger turns at the sound of our entry. His gaze flicks from our faces to Elias, searching for an explanation, but the sergeant shrugs and closes the door behind us. His footsteps fade in the corridor.
‘How did you get in here?’ There is something familiar about the face – an old man’s, creased with lines that could convey concern or annoyance. The tone of voice suggests the latter. For some reason, Ludmila seems taken aback at the sight of him.
Levi’s mouth forms a circle like it’s about to blow a bubble and the beginning of a word comes out: ‘Antik—’ The man places a finger across Levi’s lips before he can finish the sound.
‘Levi, that word is dangerous. You shouldn’t say it to anyone. I think you know that, but you’re just a little confused at the moment.’
‘What do you want with him?’ Ludmila’s voice has the crystalline edges of a Russian accent I’ve never noticed before. The man appears unfazed by the question.
‘He’s a criminal. This is a police station.’
Her mouth tightens. ‘That’s not what I asked. What does the city’s Chief Justice want with a petty thief?’
The title places the familiar face. I have seen a version of it in news reports ever since arriving in the city, but never in the flesh. This man is older than the pictures. He winces at the question. Being recognized was obviously not part of the plan that brought Amos Glassberg to this interrogation room.
‘Is he your friend? Believe it or not, I’m doing my best to keep him alive.’
Ludmila’s eyebrows come up. ‘By making him disappear?’
He nods. ‘Yes.’
‘You can see why we might be sceptical.’
‘Forgive me, Sister …’ Glassberg’s smile is a politician’s, quick but empty.
‘Ludmila Baryshnikova.’ She mirrors his expression, giving nothing away. Glassberg spares me only the briefest glance before focusing again on her. I give silent thanks she is with me. The human subtleties passing between them are opaque to me. I can only watch their game as it plays out.
‘Sister Ludmila, I understand you must be concerned if Mr Peres is your friend, but you must equally understand I have no reason to trust you. You, at least, know who I am.’
‘I’ve told you who I am. Anyway, we’ve met before.’
He grimaces. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I meet so many people.’
She waves away the apology. ‘It was a memorable occasion – the opening of the interfaith centre.’
Glassberg stands up straight, away from the table. ‘You were there? You watched the glass fall on Silas?’
‘That’s right.’
His fists unclench. He turns the chair opposite Levi around and sits facing us, gesturing for us to help ourselves to more chairs piled against the wall to our left. ‘I think we’re on the same side. The other one who was there … Hilda? She worked it out somehow, even before I understood what was happening. I know your people didn’t do it. I know Silas Mizrachi is framing your people for his attempted murder.’
The door opens, cutting off whatever the old man was about to say next. He bristles. ‘Sergeant Elias, it can’t have been more than half an hour yet. I wish I could explain, but please trust me that this is a delicate situation.’
Elias walks all the way into the room. He moves quickly, an urgent energy animating his tired frame. His gaze lingers on each of us a moment. Something has ha
ppened to change his mind about the intruders filling his station.
‘Silas Mizrachi is in the commandant’s office. Guess who he’s asking to see?’
Ludmila’s eyes lock with Glassberg’s. ‘Let us get him out of here. He’ll be safer with us. We might be able to heal him.’
The sergeant cuts in before Glassberg can reply. ‘Heal him? Ha! He’s a freaking vegetable, lady! What are you going to do? Pray him better?’
Her gaze is withering. ‘You mock what you don’t understand.’
Elias ignores the put-down and turns to the Chief Justice, waiting for a response. The lines in the old man’s face deepen. He sits in silence as if he hadn’t heard the question, as if he was alone in the room. A noisy clock on the wall ticks twenty times while he fights some silent internal battle. Finally, he stands.
‘Sergeant Elias.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I want you to release this suspect into Sister Ludmila’s custody.’
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
‘What about his stuff?’ The policeman jerks a thumb towards a canvas bag resting on a green metal filing cabinet. Ludmila’s eyes meet mine but she says nothing. These people would not understand the danger. They would think us insane.
Glassberg looks pained and then scowls. ‘It goes with him. It’s not safe here with Silas in the building. For reasons I think we all understand, there must be no record of this. Don’t discuss this with anyone, not even the commandant. I can assure you that he does not want to know.’ The little, hunched man nods grimly at those last words. ‘Get her out of here discreetly. I’ll go entertain our mutual acquaintance.’
Elias stalks to the corner of the room and pulls the canvas bag from the top of the filing cabinet. Ludmila recoils at the sight of it. She grasps one of the straps firmly and holds it at arm’s length, away from her body. It looks heavy, but her arm doesn’t even tremble. The sergeant crouches down and drapes one of Levi’s listless arms around his shoulders before hefting him out of the chair towards me. His limbs support most of his weight, but move only to keep him upright. We hobble towards the door as an awkward trio. Amos Glassberg stands watching us. In the yellow light from the ceiling, he looks jaundiced and old, but as the door closes, I see him smile briefly. It is a different smile from the one he showed us. It is the look of a man who has found something he thought lost.