End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  Alice climbed into the passenger seat, hugging her backpack to her chest. Now she understood why Stillman had put on his sunglasses, as she squinted in the blinding morning sunlight. She fumbled in the pockets of her leather jacket for her shades, barely able to see in the glare.

  “Buckle up, love.” Stillman flashed her a grin and suddenly looked years younger. “I like to take turns at speed, I'm afraid.”

  Alice hung on for dear life and Stillman whipped the Corvette around corners, zipped ahead of buses, dodged in and out of traffic. The sound of the horns blaring was almost, but not quite, drowned out by the music blaring from the car's stereo.

  Stillman yanked the cassette out of the player—the cassette—and tossed it aside, slotting another in its place. Alice picked it up and read the handwritten label. Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, Transition. Then, from the speakers came an early Bowie number, “Life on Mars?”

  “Sorry if my tastes aren't quite up to date, love.” Stillman grinned, his graying blond hair streaming behind him in the wind, his head resting against the flat side of the bullet-shaped headrest. “I've been underground for quite a long while now and only come up at nights for groceries and liquor.” He laughed and said something that was swallowed by the wind.

  “What?” Alice shouted.

  “Like a vampire,” Stillman said, leaning over and shouting into her ear.

  They sped around Piccadilly Circus, then came to a juddering halt at a red light. Stillman pointed to the towering neon sign overhead for the Temple Megastore.

  “I met him once, back in the old days, when I was still Rook One and the world made a little more sense. Temple, that is. Strange fella, that. I saw him interviewed the other night. Comes across as a mix between Richard Branson and David Bowie, worth as much as both of them combined and with less charm or sex appeal than either.”

  The light changed, and Stillman threw the car in gear.

  “Still, he knew how to throw a hell of a party, I'll give him that.”

  The British Museum was closed. A small crowd of people, mostly families with children, milled in the forecourt lawns. Stillman breezed right up to the security guard standing by the front entrance.

  “Excuse me, friend,” he said. “I'd like to talk to whomever is in charge, if you don't mind.”

  The attendant was a South Asian who looked to be a few years older than Alice. Maybe a student working weekends. He certainly had that bored part-timer look about him.

  “Sir, the museum is not open at this time. Please come back between the hours of ten o'clock and five thirty.”

  Stillman checked his watch. It was a few minutes after nine. “No.” He shook his head. “I'm afraid that won't do.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a thin leather wallet. Then he flipped it open, like a TV cop flashing a badge, and held it under the guard's nose. But when Alice looked, she saw that there wasn't a badge, just a blank, featureless piece of white paper. “My friend and I are on some urgent business and can't be delayed. Why don't you fetch your superior, and we'll be about our business.”

  The expression on the guard's face changed immediately. The bored indifference was gone, replaced by a wide-eyed look of respect commingled with a little fear. “Yes, sir. Right away. Just wait here, sir.”

  Then the guard spun around and disappeared through the door.

  Alice stepped around in front of Stillman, and got a better look at the “badge” as he was putting it away. “What? Does the sight of a blank business card strike terror into the average Londoner?”

  Stillman chuckled and flipped the thin leather wallet shut. “Not exactly. It's a kind of Neuro-Linguistic Programming I learned from my mentor. Hypnosis, if you want to use a crude analogy. By modulating the pitch and tone of my voice, and adding in a bit of subvocalization, I'm able to…”

  The rest of his explanation would have to wait for another time, since he was interrupted by the arrival of an attractive black woman in a smart business suit, her hair pulled up in a tight bun. When she spoke, it was with just the slightest hint of a West Indian accent.

  “Can I help you?” She was smiling, but her suspicion was evident.

  “Ah.” Stillman flipped the wallet open and held the blank badge out for inspection. “My name is Stillman Waters, and this is my friend…” He turned to Alice, raising an eyebrow. “You know, I don't believe we were ever properly introduced.”

  “Alice. Alice Fell.”

  “My friend Alice Fell,” Stillman continued, turning back to face the woman. “And we're here to investigate the disappearance of the ‘Vanishing Gem.’”

  “The theft, you mean?” The woman looked up from the blank badge.

  “Well,” Stillman said with a smile, “who's to say it didn't just…vanish?”

  The woman pursed her lips. “The fake left in its place, for one.”

  “Touché.” Stillman mimed a bow.

  The woman seemed to consider things for a moment, then nodded. “All right, come this way. But be quick about it. We're opening to the public in less than an hour, and we're trying to keep as tight a lid on this mess as possible.”

  The police, apparently, had been and gone days before. If the news hadn't carried the story about the theft that morning, the public would still be none the wiser. But the decision had been made to announce, and clearly their escort was less than pleased.

  Construction was ongoing at the center of the museum, a large circular court where the British Library had been housed before being moved to a new location recently, and a new courtyard with a glass and steel ceiling put in its place. It was actually because of this construction, and the attendant reorganization of the museum's holdings, their escort explained, that the gem had been discovered in the first place.

  “God knows what all is down there in the basements,” she explained. “Next thing you know we'll find a whole species of tour guides gone feral, eking out a rustic existence down there in the dark.”

  “So the gem was just discovered lying around in the basement, then?” Stillman asked.

  “Well, properly secured, of course,” the escort answered. “But essentially, yeah. We were in the process of changing out our last exhibit—‘The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come,’ did you see it?” She looked disappointed when both Alice and Stillman shook their heads.

  “I guess we missed the end of the world,” Alice said.

  “If you've seen one Apocalypse, love, you've seen them all.”

  “Well, anyway,” the escort said, “we were moving all of that gear down at the end of April, and taking the opportunity to restructure the holdings a bit, when a locked Victorian strongbox was discovered. It didn't appear on any inventory lists or manifests, going back to the museum's founding, so there was nothing for it but to open the thing up and see.”

  “And that's when the gem was discovered.”

  “Well, it wasn't easy getting the strongbox open, let me tell you. Took the better part of a week. But when we did, yes, there was the gem.” She paused to unlock a door, and then ushered them through. “Funny thing was, though it was velvet lined on the inside, it was obviously designed to hold a much larger object.”

  They were descending a flight of stairs now, away from the galleries open to the public on the floors aboveground, into the basements hidden beneath.

  “Was that when you first suspected something wasn't right about the gem? That it might be, shall we say, ‘vanishing’?”

  The escort nodded. “Maybe. I had an inkling, I suppose. When we couldn't find anything about it in the museum's archives, we sent it to the Department of Conservation and Research for analysis. It was a few weeks later that they reported back that it appeared to be losing mass.”

  “Without burning it away in the form of energy, as light or heat or what-have-you?”

  The escort nodded again. “That's right. It wasn't giving off anything, on any band of the electromagnetic spectrum, no infrared radiation, no bleed of any kind tha
t the scientists could find, or so they tell us. But it was still getting smaller, all the time.”

  “Isn't that impossible?” Alice said. “What about that whole ‘conservation of mass and energy’ thing?”

  “Well,” Stillman said with a smile, “I've often found that impossible things often aren't, and implausible things never are.”

  “So it was kept here, was it?”

  Though this room was closed to the public, the gem had been kept in a display case, even more heavily alarmed and fortified than those upstairs. As the escort explained, things like motion detectors and the like were difficult to implement in high traffic areas, but down in the basements, things were kept strictly under lock and key.

  There was a titanium and reinforced leaded glass display case at the center of the room, painted with motion sensitive lasers. Within was a cushion of black velvet. For roughly a week, since it was returned from the reseach department, it had held the Vanishing Gem. Then, for a brief time, it had held a lump of mirrored glass. Now, it was vacant.

  There were cameras in three corners of the room and pressure-sensitive plates on the floor. The display case itself was rigged with motion- and pressure-sensitive devices. There was a single door, of reinforced steel, and small air vents high on opposite walls, both of them alarmed.

  All Alice knew about security systems, beyond standard car alarms and the like, she'd learned from TV and movies and video games. From where she stood, though, if Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and Ethan Hunt teamed up—and, of course, really existed—they'd have a hard time breaking in and out of this room.

  “And there were no tripped alarms, no broken glass, nothing?” Stillman walked around the room with his hands behind his back.

  The escort shook her head. “No, nothing. Just one day the gem was there, the next it was gone.”

  Stillman nodded. “All right, then. I'll need access to all of the data. Tapes from the surveillance cameras, security logs, that sort of thing.”

  The escort regarded him warily for a moment, then went off to make the arrangements.

  “Man,” Alice said, impressed, “when you hypnotize someone, you don't mess around.”

  Stillman quirked a grin, but shook his head. “It's nothing so impressive as all that. I can't make someone do something they wouldn't do otherwise, just give them a little push. Like her, most people, they respect authority. They're happy doing what someone tells them, since it means they don't have to decide things for themselves. A little nudge to make them think you're in authority, and after that it's all beer and skittles.”

  Alice raised an eyebrow. “So would it work on me?”

  Stillman's grin broadened. “I don't know, love. You tell me.”

  Then it was back to Stillman's underground home, where he fiddled with decks of VHS and Betamax players, dragging them from the elephant's graveyard of storage in the other tunnel and hooking them up to his ancient color television. Alice took her playing cards out of her backpack and dealt a few hands of solitaire while Stillman spent hours watching the grainy black-and-white video footage or poring over indecipherable security logs, or studying schematics and floorplans.

  The playing cards had originally belonged to Naomi Vance, and she'd given them to her granddaughter years before when they wore out. Naomi played bridge, when she still had enough friends alive and still talking to her to do so, and when she ran out of friends just played solitaire. She was serious about her play and retired a deck when it got too worn, when too many cards had bent corners or nicked edges. Alice had come on her about to throw the deck away, only ten years old, and had insisted that it be given to her, instead. Naomi had relented, but only on the condition that she could teach her granddaughter to play.

  They'd played together for years. Gin rummy, or two-handed solitaire, or hearts. Even when Alice started hanging out with Nancy and going through her rebellious phase, before it ended badly that last night on the freeway, when Alice wouldn't talk to her mother for days at a time, she and Naomi still played, every week.

  Playing now, the careworn cards under her hands, reminded her of those times and helped ease the ache inside, if only a little.

  “Hey, Stillman. Since you were practically 007, did that mean you had a license to kill?”

  Stillman looked up from the security reports and the handwritten notes he was taking on a yellow legal pad and gave her an odd look.

  “I've done the necessary, a time or two.”

  “Who were they?” Alice shuffled the deck.

  Stillman was quiet for a long moment. “No,” he said at last. “You don't get to ask that. It's not proper. How would you feel, mmm? If I were to say, ‘Hey, Alice, you kill anybody lately?’”

  Alice kept her eyes on the cards, feeling the faint breeze of their fluttering on her face as they rippled together.

  “I've killed two people,” she said, quietly. “Not on purpose. But I did it. I didn't mean it, but I'm guilty all the same.”

  After a long silence, Alice looked up and met Stillman's gaze.

  “Well, then,” he said. “I suppose you know what I'm talking about.” Then he picked up the remote and started back up the playback on the VCR.

  “You don't often see work like this,” Stillman said, shaking his head in admiration. “Most thieves don't slither past detectors like in the movies. They pay their five quid and walk in with the rest of the punters, and then duck behind the drapes at closing time. They snatch and grab and smash a window to get out. When the guards come running, they think they're looking for someone breaking in, not someone breaking out, and the blagger's on the run before they even know he's gone. But a job like this…”

  He gestured to the documents fanned before him like a solitaire spread, and the black-and-white video playback.

  “This is the work of a professional. A proper cat burglar.” He mused. “If I didn't know better, I'd say it was the work of Tan Perrin, but that old bastard isn't up and around anymore, so he couldn't have done it.”

  “Know a lot of cat burglars, do you?”

  “Overlapping skill sets, I suppose you'd say. In my line of work, it paid to know how to get in and out of a place without being caught. Whether you're making off with the crown jewels or sensitive microfiche hardly matters, the idea's the same. It's all tradecraft, in the end.”

  “Ha!” Stillman slammed his fist down onto the table, knocking Alice's cards to the floor. “Got her!”

  “Got who?” Alice asked, playing fifty-two card pickup.

  “Right there!” Stillman pointed to the automated log of one of the air vent alarms. “There's tricks of the trade that everyone knows, and there's others that are as unique as fingerprints. The way that this alarm was bypassed and shunted, it's a technique I first saw years ago. Used by a pair of twins, the Fox sisters.” He smiled and glanced Alice's way. “Not the table-tapping spiritualists of the nineteenth century, of course.”

  “Oh, of course.” Like she had any idea what he was talking about.

  “Anyway, the Fox sisters died years ago, but not before handing down everything they knew, including this particular shunt.”

  “Handing it down to who?”

  Stillman picked up the phone—the corded phone—and held the heavy Bakelite handset up to his ear. “To whom, love. Not ‘who.’” Then he dialed—with a dial—and waited.

  Alice sighed. “To whom, then?”

  Stillman heard something on the line, then held up his finger. “Hughes?” He listened for a moment, then reached down and flipped a switch on the phone's sturdy base, and faint static hissed out of the speaker grill set on the side. “Hughes, can you hear me?” Stillman said, his voice raised, leaning in towards the receiver, gently resting the handset down beside it.

  “Who is this?” buzzed the voice from the speaker. It sounded American, and male.

  “Remember that time in Majorca, Hughes? You owe me.”

  There was silence for a long moment. “Shit. Waters, what the hell do you want?�
�

  “Where's Aria, Hughes? I need to talk to her.”

  “Aria who?”

  “Don't play the fool with me, Hughes.” Stillman still smiled, but there was steel beneath his words. “Where's Aria Fox?”

  Silence again, faintly peppered with static. “You know I can't tell you that, Waters. Client confidentiality, all of that jazz.”

  “Mmm mmm,” Stillman hummed, nodding. “And I'm sure the Policía Nacional in Madrid would be interested to hear all about the events of that January day, don't you? What do you suppose they'd say about confidentiality, mmm?”

  Static hissed from the speaker.

  “Fine. Okay? Fine. I…I can't tell you exactly. I've got a reputation to protect here, don't I? But…Okay, I can tell you that Aria was very, very pissed that her most recent…assignment meant she had to miss David Bowie's concert at the Roseland Ballroom in New York the other day.”

  “What?”

  “Well, she had tickets for the eighteenth, last Saturday, but Bowie cancelled due to laryngitis, and she would have gone to the fan club show the next night, but she'd already booked the flight.” Static. “She's a huge Bowie fan.”

  Stillman shifted on the couch, becoming increasingly annoyed. “Look, Hughes. I believe I've been more than fair with you over the years. Now, if you don't tell me what I want to know and stop messing me about with this trivia, I'm going to get quite cross.”

  “Sorry, Waters, that's all I can tell you. Don't call again.”

  Then there was a click, and the line went dead. Then a noise started from the speaker, which it took Alice a moment to recognize as an off-hook tone.

  “Cheeky bastard,” Stillman said, and reached over to redial. But this time, the phone on the other end just rang, and rang, and rang.

  Stillman slammed the handset down on the receiver, lip curled in anger.

  “Wait a minute,” Alice said, trying to tease a specific memory out of the confusion of the past day. “Bowie's supposed to be playing some festival this weekend for the first time in thirty years.”